Come Dance With Me

6 Jimmy Wicks

22 January 2003. You work with somebody for years, you go on tour together, you eat and sleep and go to the toilet in the same bus day after day, mile after mile, you get to know each other’s smells but you don’t know fuck all. She talks to me about the music, we work on songs together. Does she think there’s anything else in my head besides a fuzz box and a wah-wah pedal? She’d probably be surprised to know that I have pictures in my mind apart from what I see with my eyes. Pictures of her sometimes. Strange ones. Naked in a high place. Or looking at me through trees. Like dream pictures with sounds and smells. Sometimes the sea.

How did I get to be what I am, where I am? Nothing unusual about the start of it. Back in the sixties if you wanted to pull the birds you learned how to play a guitar, just like now. And if you couldn’t join a band you formed one, so that’s what Sid Horstmann and I did. We found two other guys for bass and drums and we put together a kind of skiffle band, The Winkle-Pickers. Learned ‘Cumberland Gap’ and after a while we got hold of a bloke with a Vox Continental and we were on our way. Did our first gig at The Cave in Bethnal Green and from then on we went up and down and sideways with changes until Buck Travis came in on keyboards in 1972 and Bert and Shorty joined us shortly after. We called ourselves Ouija Board for the first three years, then we changed our act and became Mobile Mortuary. Christabel didn’t come into the band until 1980, and that’s when we had our first chart record: ‘Haunt Me’ at No. 3. Thirty-one years this band’s been together! A lot of marriages don’t last that long.

Sid always had to be the alpha male. He didn’t look like James Dean but he tried for a James Dean look. Live fast, die young, and get as much pussy as you can. He wasn’t in love with Christabel but he didn’t like it when she went out with that weirdo from Sayings of Confucius. She didn’t love Sid but she was the one who started this Anubis huddle shit after he was in a body drawer he couldn’t climb out of. By now she’s so used to feeling guilty she’d be miserable without it. She’s fifty-four and I’m sixty. This new boyfriend looks at least as old as I am. I’ve never made a move yet, each time I thought I might the time didn’t seem right. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I think of how I took up the guitar to pull the birds. Tracy was one of the first I pulled and no sooner had I played a few riffs than she got pregnant. With two big brothers and a father with a very short fuse. Hello, Mrs Jimmy.

After Tracy took the kids and left me I thought I’d come out and tell Christabel how I felt. I didn’t, though. She still looks pretty good. I don’t know, if I’m careful maybe I can outlive the competition. Time will tell, they say. It’s been telling me for years but I try not to listen.