From ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)
In my late teens, my da died.
It was pretty sudden, from a brain haemorrhage when he was visiting his own da. My da was the eldest of 5 children born between the 40s-60s in the east end of Glasgow and had a volatile relationship with all of them. The weight of expectation he’d been lumbered with throughout his life perched heavy on the furrowed, dark brow that constantly furnished his olive face. He’d visit his da every Sunday on the top floor of a Dennistoun row of tenements where they’d sit in the kitchen at a table coated in cigarette ash and sugar and argue about anything they could find to argue about, regardless of whether an argument was needed to settle it. Coming from a world before Google, with which all those arbitrary disagreements could quickly be resolved, there was likely a comfort for both of them in these extended, and sometimes aggressive, duels that were less about fact and more about proving who had cerebral superiority in the relationship. It was a combative, exhausting relationship that my da had somehow carried like luggage through his life and transferred on to his own kids.
I’m the youngest of three siblings, but none of us had really inherited his attitude entirely. My maw had a far more laid back worldview until some unseen umbrage was taken by her, at which point she’d unleash a Glasgow Townhead fury unexpected of her slight frame. When I was young, my maw and da had saved up for a year to take a bus to France, and we all piled on this damp coach that took forever. Once we got to France, we started to explore the Metro underground railway system and my maw, ever vigilant from growing up poor in Glasgow’s notoriously rough east end, clocked two suspicious men tailing us.
On the way up some escalators, the men edged close behind us. At the top, one of them purposely dropped a cigarette packet in front of my da’s feet, while the other grabbed at his back pocket to try to clumsily remove his wallet. My maw, who had watched it happen, ready to pounce, was instantly enraged and screamed, “Jim, he’s trying to fucking mug you.”
I remember staring at my dad, slam dancing at the peak of the escalators with two men clutching his pelvis, reaching for a semblance of a wallet but accidentally cupping his balls. He looked vaguely annoyed, but yelled back, “I fucking know I’m being mugged.” As if the problem there wasn’t that he was being mugged, but that my maw had accused him of not being aware it was happening.
While I stood frozen by the situation, my maw rushed them, grabbing one guy by his continental mullet, and heaving his much larger frame away before pushing the other up against the wall and screaming, “Right, get tae fuck, you.”
The two men muttered something in French, then casually sauntered away defeated. While elated he hadn’t been taken advantage of, my da remained grimly angry at my maw for the rest of the evening for assuming he didn’t know he was being mugged when he clearly knew he was being mugged.
I’d never really known my da happy. He was consistently this black cloud in the room of my life, looking for issues to complain about. His dark moustache was a dismal archway above a pursed mouth that unleashed torrents of negativity and fury. I can assume this was because of the tough life he’d had, and a feeling of disappointment in the one he’d found himself stuck within. As the youngest sibling of three, all of whom are ten or more years older than me, my very existence has been attributed to several factors — a regrettable surprise, or that I was a happy accident intended to save an already crumbling marriage. My introduction to the world was flawed from the beginning when I was born with two holes in my heart, causing a year of worry, anxiety, and money troubles for my already skint family that drove them all further apart. I feel unfathomable and unshifting guilt for the neglect my brother and sister must’ve felt while going through puberty as my maw and da tirelessly took me to the hospital, stayed there, and doted hours on my frail wee body. I feel bad that the stress I caused them all was likely an increasing strain on the marriage that was already ripping at the seams. But their dedication to simply keeping me alive is something for which I’m reluctantly grateful. The operation that saved my life left me with an obtrusive, long scar down the centre of my torso, which my maw would refer to as my ‘zip’, and it allowed me to live a mediocre life in which I could form a band, tour the world, and fail at being an international rock star.
While none of my family have ever made me feel anything less than wanted, at least to my face, we had never been ones for affection, verbal or physical. I’m not sure I’ve ever hugged my brother or sister. I don’t remember ever having any affection from my da. And I don’t mean this as a ‘woe is me’ moment, just that it wasn’t the way our family was constructed. I didn’t even know it was unusual until I saw my friend, who has a huge Catholic family, and his siblings interact. When I saw his maw and da be gently affectionate with each other, and their kids, there was a genuine pang of loss in my fixed heart. My entire source of affection came from my wee maw, but has always been delivered in an aloof, doe-eyed Glasgow manner, through action rather than words.
By the time I reached 8 or 9, my brother and sister, exhausted and forced out by the oppressive nature of my da getting more bitter and aggressive in his old age, had left home and my parents’ relationship disintegrated further. I was essentially brought up lonely by computer games, films, and crayons, punctuated by my maw screaming at my da, or my da waking up or coming home, in an angry, violent mood. What he lacked in niceties, he made up for by essentially leaving me alone, a luxury my siblings never had. I could time my day by figuring out when he’d be around and when wouldn’t, so I could avoid crossing his path.
When my da died, my siblings came home, and it was the first time we were all in a house together again since I was 7. While they had their problems, my maw had a historic, earnest love for my da and the wistful, poetic misery of their relationship. They’d been together since she was 19, and she didn’t cope well with his sudden death. Before his funeral, she would be zonked off her face on whatever the doctor would give her, stumbling about the house, asking us who we were, and unable to look at anything that reminded her of her husband.
Given that my da’s death had been sudden, and it was close to Christmas, we had a long time to wait before the post-mortem would be completed and before we could arrange a funeral. So we were all stuck in this weird death-tinged limbo for weeks.
If you’ve ever had a death in your close family, you’ll know the limbo I’m referring to — a heavy, overwhelming air hangs over your house. Every tick from a clock feels like a weighted clang, and there’s poignancy in every bit of dust that survived longer than they did, with a pointed sentimentality attributed to items that would otherwise be mundane.
One night, my maw had made the perilous ascent upstairs early to bed, which took much longer than it should’ve given she stopped on each stair to ask how feet worked. It left myself and my siblings alone in the living room for the first time since we were young.
Around midnight, my sister went outside for a final cigarette of the night, leaning against the open front door, pushing smoke up into the stage lights of the lampposts. We had agreed that my brother should clamber into the loft and dig around to find some comfort in nostalgia, to find some remnants of our childhood that wouldn’t be coated in the oppressive dust of death that everything in the living room he’d recently touched had. He found an old reel-to-reel tape deck stashed behind a box entirely full of Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts my dad had somehow collected despite not really being into hard rock, or cafes, or t-shirts.
But my da had loved music. My da had been a songwriter, and a keen guitarist. He kept an acoustic guitar beside his chair — the good chair — in the living room throughout my entire life. This was a Suzuki 1950s replica, with a tinge of a sunburst body and red, detailed scratchboard. I say that for the benefit of any guitar enthusiasts but, to me, it was just my da’s guitar I wasn’t supposed to touch. Its frets were worn down to the bone from overuse, and its strings just razor wire from never being changed, stuck in place for eternity. Every night, apropos of nothing, he’d grab it and burst into song like he lived in a fucking musical.
You may think this sounds cute and twee, but like everything my da had a hand in, it was delivered aggressively. You’d be watching TV and suddenly my da would be blaring out Roy Orbison covers. It would last hours, and we all learned to just zone it out so we could still hear the TV or at least lip-read it. If you dared beg him to stop or quieten down, you were simply asking to have that guitar rattled off your head. Emboldened in my early teens, I once asked if he could be a bit quieter so I could hear a programme I’d been trying to watch and he threw a cup of tea at me which bounced off my glasses, causing them to cut my nose. The cup then boomeranged its way back to him and he used his socked foot to kick it at the fireplace where it smashed, and then he stopped playing suddenly and, actually impressed, said, “Look what you fucking did.”
Every night as I pulled the covers over my head to try to sleep, I’d hear him downstairs or in the other room, booming out cover versions and original songs, his voice echoing around the peeling wallpaper and the cat-ripped carpets. I couldn’t stand it, it was an almost torturous cacophony at times. Like me, my dad had no natural talent as a singer, and his range was limited, varying between two or three notes at a time. But, like me, he wasn’t one to let lack of talent stand in his way, and had committed his free time to music outside of his work as an electrician. Many passions bely the talent needed to truly shine, and I agree with the sentiment that you don’t have to be the best at something to enjoy it. Music, like all art, shouldn’t be a competition. The only competition here was between the volume of the TV and the volume of his own personal concert while he sat on the good chair.
He’d used this reel-to-reel tape deck in the 60s to record song ideas and jokes that he’d then send to his pal, with the idea of starting an act together to play clubs, or to sell songs. But, given my da refused to throw anything away that still had moving parts, he’d still been using this tape deck right into the 80s and maybe beyond. Alongside the tape deck in the loft, we had found some spools of tape, one marked with my brother and sister’s name.
So we pulled this down from the loft and set it up in the middle of the living room, as we sat around it like a campfire, waiting for it to tell us stories.
My sister came back into the house, shivering from the wintery cold, a price my da had insisted she paid if she‘d made the decision to ruin her lungs with the devil’s death sticks, and something she was still obeying despite the fact he no longer had any mortal authority. Her body gave one last shiver, and closed over the living room door entirely, inviting the cold to leave.
They were both excited to hear a lost part of their childhood — a glimpse into their past they didn’t even know existed. Before mobile phones and digital storage, there were limited remnants of your childhood that you carried throughout your life. A select number of photos or videos that you’d watch from time to time, and those things became your memory rather than your memories. These artificial, tangible moments became the things you recalled when asked about your childhood rather than your actual recollection of it.
We loaded up the reel with their names etched on it in pencil, and pressed play.
The old machine clunked into action, and the reels started churning around. The pops and crackles you get only from analogue recordings were soothingly evocative as they cut into the quiet, laden air around us.
Then, suddenly, we could hear my da’s voice coming out of it.
“Hello there!” he said in his big, low Glaswegian accent. And it was eerie to hear it again, his voice resonant and booming through the antiquated in-built speakers of the tape deck, filling the room that, just a week or so earlier, had still been filled with it. We could almost see his face. But it didn’t sound dark and angry to me. It sounded almost happy.
Then wee voices came through, the voices of my brother and sister as children, talking cheerily to my da. He was asking them daft questions about their life — their favourite colour, their favourite teacher, what would happen if the toilet exploded and you’d just done a jobby — the usual, important questions any 5 year old wants to be asked.
My brother and sister laughed and smiled at the tape, and I joined them, sharing a nostalgia for a past that wasn’t mine. It was then I realised they had a different da to me. The time between our childhoods had changed him. He had once been funny, creative, daft, but it wasn’t the da I’d ever really known. My da had been stern, tired, and disappointed in the world.
To hear him this way, like somebody else’s da, was like experiencing another dimension of a life you knew. A parallel universe that was both familiar and jarringly different. I’d never known my da happy, but here it was. He had been happy. Before me, before my multiple heart operations.
His voice kept booming about, telling wee stories, singing songs. We were so silent just listening to it, enamoured and comforted by the added poignancy of it all. His voice was bouncing around the walls like it had done when he’d picked up the guitar while we were all trying to watch the telly. But this time we were properly listening, and he had the audience he’d always wanted.
At one point, the songs and jokes stopped suddenly, and he addressed the tape.
“There’s somebody at the door,” his old throat said.
My sister’s wee 5 year old voice poked up on the tape, “Who?”
My da left a crackly silence, and then said, “There’s somebody there.”
We were all sitting in this creepy cold silence in the dark of the living room, listening to the disembodied voice of my dead da, staring down at this ancient box that seemingly housed his very essence.
The mechanical hissing of the machine grew louder while nobody spoke.
“Come in,” my da then said softly on the tape.
My brother and sister were as quiet on the tape as they were right then, all those years later.
And then his voiced boomed, “Come in! COME IN!”
Outside, behind the closed living room door, we heard and felt the front door swing open, and then slam shut with an urgent, pounding bang.
We shat ourselves.
For a brief moment, I think we all thought surely not. Surely this was a weird, tense coincidence. But immediately after we heard the front door slam shut, we heard quick, rushed footsteps in the hall.
Someone had come in.
And not only that, they were running up the stairs, literally bounding towards my maw’s bedroom. The one, only a week earlier, she’d shared with my da.
People talk about fight or flight, and let me tell you right now, I’m assuredly a flight person, because I fucking bolted in the opposite direction. But my brother darted straight to the living room door, pulled it open, and dashed into the hall at the bottom of the stairs.
“Who the fuck’s in here?” he shouted, with not quite as much threatening anger as he may have imagined he had.
No reply.
I could hear him stomp upstairs, trying to give each step a weight that might imply strength rather than terror. Me? I was absolutely nowhere to be seen. I was in the kitchen ready to find a knife because I’d grown up on horror films while my maw and da argued in another room.
But that’s where the tension ended. We could hear my brother’s voice upstairs, talking calmly. We slowly peeked round the doorway into the hall and saw my brother descending the stairs, followed by my stumbling aunt.
“It’s just Evelyn,” he said, his voice surfing on adrenaline, “She just came to see if our maw’s alright.”
Auntie Evelyn gripped at the bannister with two white hands, sliding down it, the stench of alcohol following her like her weans once did.
“What’s happened?” I asked, and my brother shook his head.
It turned out that she’d got in a taxi, absolutely fleein on booze, and come to check on our maw, having lost her own husband a few years earlier. She turned up at the house and found the door unlocked from when my sister had come back from her final cigarette, and had invited herself straight in.
But the fact she’d arrived almost exactly when summoned by my da from the past is a moment that made me realise I’d probably survive a horror film, because at the first sign of creepiness, I would literally run the fuck away.
Some questions remained though, who was my da telling to ‘come in’ on the tape? Not a fucking clue. We shat ourselves so much, we never listened to the end of the tape, and it eventually got lost in the swamp of time through house moves.
Some tapes that persisted, however, were recordings of songs by my da. And hearing them took me right back to him sitting on the good chair, bellowing them out night after night while I really struggled to hear You’ve Been Framed, or tried desperately to sleep.
He wasn’t a man of affection, and he wasn’t trying to disrupt us with songs. The older I get, the more I understand this was his way of communicating his feelings, and talking to us in some manner, as antagonistic and confusing a way as it was. And we just ignored it. Just tried to zone it out.
I never knew my da, not really. I knew a portion of his life, and it was a portion he was frustrated, and disappointed by, but he had lived a long time before he succumbed to that version of himself.
Not long after he died, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I swore I could hear his voice and guitar downstairs, inconsiderately wheeling out a set of 60s classics. And instead of being freaked out or annoyed, I found it entirely comforting, and I drifted back off to sleep.
I may not have appreciated his chair songs at the time, but I wish I’d listened more. And I would love to hear just one more wee tune.
Come in.
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