Espedair Street

EIGHT

There is no such thing as too much money. Anybody who has more money than they know what to do with has no imagination. You can always find new things to spend money on; houses, estates, cars, aircraft, boats, clothes, expensive paintings...

Most really rich people usually find thoroughly appropriate ways of getting rid of some of their funds; they take up ocean-going yacht racing, they collect a string of racehorses, they buy newspapers and television stations or car companies, they fund prizes and scholarships or give their money and their names to hospital wings or new bits of art galleries. Purchasing a chain of hotels is a popular option; gives you places to stay all over the world, and you don't lose any time buying the hotel when you want to sack the manager.

God almighty, offer me any sum of money from one pound to total control of the entire world economy and I could tell you just what I'd do with it, without even having to think very much.

But only in an advisory capacity. Only theoretically. Don't expect me actually to do the things I'd say I'd do. I know now that, regardless of how much money I have, I'll stay much as I am. I had my fill of trying to be somebody else, of fulfilling my own fantasies and making them up for other people; tried that, been there.

Mine turned bad on me, mine turned lethal, eventually.

But I did my bit. I played my part in the great commercial dance; I accepted all that money and I spent it on all sorts of daft, stupid, useless, wasteful things, and quite a lot of drugs too. I had my flash car (even if I couldn't drive it) and I had my big house and my estate in the Highlands.

The house was made up of equal parts of draughts and damp, and the estate was ten thousand acres of bog and scrappy heather. The only things I left planted there were wellington boots, sucked off by the clinging peat. There were deer on those there hills and fish in them there burns, but I didn't want to kill any of them, which made the whole enterprise a bit of a waste of time. I sold it eventually, to people who drained the ground and planted trees. I made on the deal, of course. I bought my ma a house in Kilbarchan, and I put up half the money for the Community Rehearsal and Recording Suite we donated to Paisley Council.

I even owned an island for a while; an inner Hebridean island I picked up ridiculously cheap at an auction in London. I had all sorts of wonderful plans for it, but the crofters resented me even though I meant well, and when I thought about it I guessed I'd have felt the same way if I'd been one of them; who did this lowlander, this Glesga Keelie, this youth of a 'pop' star think he was? Why, I didn't even have the Gaelic (I was going to learn the goddamn language, but I never got... oh never mind).

They'd seen too many grand schemes come to nothing, too many promises disappear into the mists, and too many owners spend all their time somewhere else more comfortable and sunny. They were a surly and unfriendly bunch, but they had a point; I sold the island to them as soon as my accountants had worked out a way of writing it off against tax. Lost a bit on that one, but you can't win them all.

So I've done all that, and I got fed up with it. My dreams came true, and I discovered that once they did, they were no longer dreams, just new ways of living, with their own problems and difficulties. Maybe if I'd been working on new dreams while the old ones were coming true I could have kept going, heading for even greener hillsides, even newer pastures, but I guess I just ran out of material, or I used it all up in the songs.

That might be it. Maybe I used up all my dreams in my songs so that I had none left for myself. That would be ironic, almost tragic, because at the time I thought I had perfect control; I thought I was being clever, using my songs, using my dreams, to find out more about myself... a shame, really, that what I found out just wasn't worth the finding.

I think I hoped to find myself in my fantasies, to see the shape of who I really was in the pattern of my realised dreams, and when it all happened, and I did, I just wasn't very impressed with what I found there. It wasn't that I actively disliked myself, just that I wasn't as interesting and fine and noble a person as I'd thought I was. I used to think that all I needed was the opportunity, and I'd blossom, I'd flower, I'd spread my wings and fly... but discovered in the end that I was a weed, and that some buds just never open, and that some caterpillars were only ever worms with an identity crisis.

So I became a hermit crab instead, and look at the big shell I found! Well, I'm no shortarse. I need the headroom.

St Jute's and I are suited.

'Wes, you're not serious.'

'Hey, of course I'm serious.'

'No, I... no, not even you. You c-can't be serious. You can't mean it. Come on; it's a joke.'

'It's not a joke, man. One day everybody'll live like that. This is the future and you'd better get used to it.'

'Jesus, you are serious.'

'I already told you that.'

'You're mad.' I turned to Inez. 'Tell him he's mad.'

Inez looked up from her magazine. 'You're mad.'

'See?' I said to him. 'Even Inez agrees.'

Wes just shook his head and looked out of the car window at the passing Cornish scenery. 'It's the future, man. Might as well get used to it now.'

The Panther de Ville swept down the high-banked Cornish lanes, between the rainswept golden fields of summer. Clouds moved like bright ships, alternately battleship grey and the colour of the sun. The air was warm and a little humid outside and we had the air conditioning on. I refilled Inez' tumbler with champagne. She, Wes and I were on our way down from London to Wes' house, for that weekend's party.

The big car braked suddenly as we came round a bend and found a tractor backing a trailer into a field from the road. I tutted, shook my hand and reached for a napkin. 'Hey, Jas,' I said, 'we're not in a hurry.' Jasmine stopped the car to wait for the tractor to unblock the road. She looked round from the driver's seat and pushed her cap back, showing the shaved sides of her head. She'd rather taken to the punk look over the last month. I'd preferred it when she had long blonde hair, but I wasn't going to say anything.

'Spill your champers, did I?'

'Yeah.' I filled Wes' glass too, then my own.

'Never mind, love; carpet's champagne coloured, innit?'

'Jas, the bodywork is champagne coloured, but that doesn't mean I'm going to wash it with Moët.'

Jas looked at my full tumbler. (Flutes are impractical when you're travelling. Especially when Jas is driving.) 'Give us a glass, Dan,' she said.

'Wait till we get to the house,' I told her. She looked peeved.

'Give us some coke, then,' she suggested.

'What?' I shoured. 'Are you kidding? Last time I gave you that stuff we ended up doing a hundred and forty down the M6! Never again!'

This was all true, by the way; no exaggeration. After that incident, I'd decided the de Ville was maybe a bit too highly powered for Jasmine; she'd only passed her test that spring, after all, and the twelve cylinder Jaguar engine was tuned-up to lay about four hundred horsepower on the road, if you kicked the beast hard enough.

I'd rung up Panther and asked if there was any way of sort of shutting off half the cylinders or something, bur the dealer said no, there wasn't, in a voice that seemed to want to ask me whether I was certain I was really fit to own such a fine motor.

I'd have switched to another car but I didn't want to let the de Ville our of my sight; I'd mislaid five grand's worth of coke in the upholstery somewhere when I'd been drunk, and I was still looking for it.

I remembered stashing the drug, but not exactly where; as well as being drunk and stoned I'd been in a severe paranoid fugue, nor simply because I was carrying the stuff but because we were in the middle of Hyde Park at lunchtime, and Jasmine had the Panther doing fifty miles an hour over the grass, scattering sunbathers like startled grouse and accounting for at least two brace of deckchairs.

We'd had an argument about sex; Jasmine wanted some and I had prioritised getting to the record company office for a Rolling Stone photo session above finding the nearest drive-through car wash and parking in it while Jas climbed into the back with me and took off her uniform. She calmed down eventually and somehow we got out of the park without being arrested, but in all the excitement I forgot I'd planted the coke in a Safe Place and didn't remember until a week later when we were starting to run out of the stuff. I knew I hadn't thrown it out of a door or window because Jas had found a way of locking them all so I couldn't jump out. Anyway, I was still looking for the cocaine and when I did find it Jasmine wasn't getting any, not when she was driving, not after that last time on the M6.

'Thought it was speed, didn't I?' Jasmine giggled roguishly.

'Oh, very funny, Jas.' The tractor had cleared the road. I nodded forward. 'Road's clear, Jasmine.'

'Go on,' she said, winking at me. 'Just one glass.'

Inez put her magazine down. 'Jasmine,' she said tiredly.

'I...' Jas began. Then a fusillade of car horns sounded from behind us. Jas looked unconcernedly over our shoulders through the rear window, then put both elbows on the back of her seat. 'Come on,' she said. 'I drive better smashed.'

'I wish she wouldn't use that word,' Wes muttered, shaking his head and looking at the earth bank opposite. The honking noises behind us increased.

'Jas,' I said, pointing forward again, 'just drive.' I pressed the button that elevated the glass screen between us, and Jasmine's elbows were slowly lifted up; her face assumed a look of annoyance, and as the glass hissed up into place she was turning round to look furiously at a small red Mini, squeezing past us from behind. She lowered her window and started shouting inaudibly at the car and giving it the finger. I listened in via the intercom.

'-unt!' Jas' tinny voice shouted. 'Ever been fist fucked? Wanna start?' I turned the intercom off again. The car leapt away, spilling more champagne. I rocked back in my seat. The Panther was accelerating hard, the grassy banks and hedgerows blurring past. The rear of the red Mini was rapidly coming closer. I stabbed at the intercom button again.

'And don't you dare run that car off the road, you bitch! Just slow down! You know what happened the last time! I'm warning you!' Jas stamped on the brakes, looked round glaring at me, then threw her champagne-coloured chauffeuse's cap down into the footwell. She settled down to thirty miles an hour and thereafter drove hunched up over the wheel with her epauletted shoulders set in their 'I do not want to talk about it' position. I dried my hands again and sat back in the seat.

'She's got to go,' Inez said, turning a page in her Cosmopolitan.

'She's right; it's you or her,' Wes told me. I shook my head.

'I'll keep her on till I learn to drive myself,' I told them. Inez guffawed. Wes looked away at the fields again, shaking his head.

'Wes,' Inez said, putting the magazine down and looking at him seriously.

'Yeah?'

'Are you serious about this... bugging?'

'Sure.' He nodded. He took the silver cigarette case from the rosewood table set between Inez and me and took out a joint. 'Yeah; of course.' He used the cigar lighter, sat back, looking at Inez and me in turn. Inez pursed her lips.

'Well, I'm not staying in your house then, Weston. I'll find a hotel in Newquay. How about you?' She asked me. I shrugged, took one of the spliffs as well.

Beautifully rolled. This was the other reason I kept Jas on.

That and the fact that her father was a gangster from the East End and she'd threatened to tell him I'd raped her if I didn't keep her near me. I didn't fancy a radical penisectomy just then so I agreed. Jas wanted me to screw her but I was half-terrified that if I ever did she'd develop an even closer attachment and I'd never get rid of her (elephantiasis of the ego is endemic amongst rock stars, never forget), and also half-reluctant not to have her around. She was a pet, a conversation piece. She had character. It was all bad, but she had it.

'Well?' Inez said, pointedly. I sighed. I still wanted to stay at Wes' place; it would be something different. But Inez probably expected me to come with her .

'Yeah, all right,' I said. 'Hotel.' I gestured with the flats of my hands to Wes. 'Sorry,' I told him.

'Hey, that's all right, man.' Wes stared out over a low hedge at the sloping fields and towards the distant line of surf breaking on the rocks of the north Cornish coast. 'Still a free country,' he muttered, then sighed and said, 'hey; let's put on some sounds. Too quiet in here.'

Jasmine eventually passed the red Mini on a straight stretch of A class road. She cut in sharply and the Mini flashed its lights at her, but at least she didn't spill any champagne.

Ah, Jesus, big houses, fast cars and sleek women. Fame and fortune; nothing wrong with it as long as you're young enough to enjoy it and old enough to control it.

The others didn't make as much as I did, but they all made a lot. We hit the industry at a good time, when albums were selling well. We peaked in the UK in '78, the same year the greatest number of records were sold, and by then we were big in the States too; big worldwide, in fact. Far too much has been written already about what we represented, where we fitted in and what we stood for, but I suppose there's some truth in it all somewhere, and I guess I would go along with the idea we were a sort of half step towards punk; just different enough to be novel, not quite mad enough to be a threat.

We fell between two stools and made our piles, if you want the gist of it. We were claimed as being all sorts of things; we had a foot in more camps than we had feet to put them in. We were the band that made your brain think and your foot tap at the same time (not a trick everybody can manage, mind you; there are some real thickets around). We had — dare I say it — class.

And we were the band whose gimmick was... music. Oh, yes, we had that reputation, God knows how. I was immensely proud of it at the time but it all seems meaningless now. We put our songs together differently, we used different patterns of musical development, unusual chords, unlikely but convincing layers of sound. Hell, all I was trying to do was sound just the same as everybody else; those were my attempts to be normal, for God's sake. I just kept getting it wrong, that was all.

But when anyone asked how we did it, how we'd got where we had, I used to tell them that it was just the tunes. That was it. In the end it's the music that sells. Tunes people can remember and hum and whistle and plunk out on their own guitars.

All the rest, from the chords, the arrangement, the instrumental virtuosity, to the image, the marketing, the pyrotechnic stage shows... all of it's just window dressing. In the end there's only the music. In my case, literally the tunes; my lyrics are rarely more than competent, and not even always that. Music is the stuff; comparatively few people have sold lots of records on the strength of just the lyrics. And music travels better, too.

Of course, fashion sells, a beat can sell, a particular style or technique or skill or just artist can sell, and increasingly what the industry tries to package and sell is image, but none of those are as reliable or as durable as a good tune.

Image is easier to manipulate corporately, though, and the big companies feel it's something they control rather than the artist, so they like it for that reason alone. We just happened to be what people wanted at the time; we were lucky. But ever since Elvis Presley — possibly ever since Frank Sinatra — the companies have been trying to take the luck out of it and design the images of the bands and singers they push. They've been trying it for years and they're getting very adept, and now — ironically — the whole idea of an image is so much taken for granted as an important — often vital — part of what makes a group successful that the kids have started doing it themselves; they work on their image as much as the songs, before they ever get as far as the A&R men! Strange days indeed.

Oh, well, what the hell. Wasn't like this in my young days though. Well, not as far as I know...

We toured the UK, Europe and Scandinavia, and the US; we made Night Shines Darkly and got ready to tour the world. We'd stayed with ARC, but we'd negotiated another three album deal so reasonable and fair that to this day Rick Tumber winces whenever it's mentioned.

We'd had plans to form our own record company, put out our own stuff, have more control, but... we never got around to it. It took all our time and effort touring and recording; setting up a record company and making it work would have needed too much time. I was disappointed and relieved at the same time. I'd had all sorts of crazy plans (and bad titles) ready. I'd wanted to call it the Obscure Record Label, but that was shouted down as soon as I mentioned it, and I think I lost interest after that. We stayed with the big boys and they gave us lots of sweeties; tons and tons of candy.

As Frozen Gold, the five of us were probably outgrossing the GNP of some small third world countries, but most of us had no fixed abode. I had to ring up my accountants to find out where I lived. We'd all bought places of some sort in Britain; I had my Scottish estate, Davey had a mansion in Kent, Wes had his house in Cornwall, Christine owned a small block of fiats in Kensington, Mickey had installed his parents in a house near Drymen, overlooking Loch Lomond, but none of us were domiciled in the UK.

Tax reasons, of course. We weren't allowed to spend more than three months in Britain, but for three years running we didn't even manage that amount. We spent so much time out of the country touring there was no point in being registered for tax in Britain (and I didn't think Sunny Jim Callaghan's watered-down-rosé government deserved my money anyway... what a joke that seems now). I think, technically, we lived in LA for the second half of the seventies. But it might have been the Cayman Islands.

Made no difference to us. We stayed in hotels in major cities, we stayed in apartments and houses connected to recording studios in Paris or Florida or Jamaica, we stayed with friends and famous people and sometimes we spent a week or two in our places in the UK, and occasionally visited our parents.

Just living out the dream... or our separate dreams.

Davey's was to be the guitar hero incarnate, but I think he knew even then that their heyday had been and gone. He got there just too late, in time to hit the wave as it started to collapse. He didn't play any worse because he wasn't getting the adulation he thought he ought to get; he may even have played better, trying harder, but I don't think he ever thought he'd fulfilled his dreams.

He didn't just want to be mentioned in the same breath as Hendrix or Clapton or Jimmy Page; he wanted them to be mentioned in the same breath as him. But the time to construct such legends had passed. He'd never quite be on the same level, even if he was as good (and he believed he was). So there was always something left for him to aim for.

At the time, I didn't envy him.

Perhaps it was some unfulfilled part of Davey's extemporising talent that sublimated itself in practical jokes and hair-raising stunts. He'd gone from being David Balfour, esquire, to Dave Balfour, to Davey Balfour to Crazy Davey Balfour. That was what they ended up calling him in the papers. For once, they were just about right.

Davey started doing things to hotels. He'd taken up climbing, and would occasionally swarm up the outside of the hotel rather than use the elevators. There's a hotel in Hamburg where they still talk about the time the mad Schottlander decided to set up a record for getting from lobby to roof, up the stairs, by motorbike. He did almost kill himself with that one; came down in the lift with the motor idling, and arrived back in the lobby half-stupefied with carbon monoxide poisoning.

On stage, for one UK tour, Crazy Davey had been Mad Man. This had been his own idea, not mine. What happened was that Davey would go offstage for ten minutes or so, and then reappear in a blaze of lights and dry ice through (if it was available) a hole in the stage.

He had a power saw strapped to each arm, screaming away with the trigger throttles taped on maximum revs; lit welding torches were tied to his knees and flaming blowtorches to his ankles. On his head he had a light crash helmet like the ones canoeists wear, with a couple of electric drills bolted to the top and running. Dozens of lights and sequenced flash units completed the immediate effect. He'd just stand there for a few moments, while the crowd, most of whom had heard of the stunt and had been waiting for Mad Man to appear, went wild.

Then stage hands would come up with bits of brick, steel, wood and plastic, and hold them up to Davey; who stretched out an arm, or flexed a leg, or just nodded; sparks flew and metal tore; dust rose and bricks disintegrated; sawdust showered and boards snapped; plastic burned. All the time, Davey was singing ('Afterburn') ... or trying to. The noise was bedlam, actually, full of interference, but it was effective.

It was an insanely dangerous stunt, and we had some problems with fire regulations, but what really killed the act were two things. First, Davey nicked a little finger on a drill at the Glasgow Apollo gig and had to have it bandaged; it was his right hand, so it didn't matter too much, though he still felt he was only playing at about ninety per cent; but nobody would insure his fingers while he was doing the act, and that did worry him. The other thing that killed it was Big Sam; the stunt wasn't right for us, he said; too violent, just not the right image.

The rest of us agreed, and Davey seemed happy just to have done it.

Then there were the practical jokes. There was one American tour when he took to sabotaging my hotel room every second or third night. It started out with unscrewing the door handle from the inside, so that it came away in my hand, but escalated to the stage that the guy must have been putting more effort and thought into how to surprise me that night than he was into playing for a stadium full of customers.

I'd almost got used to coming back to my room to find everything in it had been turned upside down, or that it was utterly bare, stripped even of the carpets and light fittings, when one evening Davey surprised me with a better trick; he lowered himself on a rope into my room, hung the television out of the window held only by a rope tied to the inside door handle, then took all the screws out of the door hinges.

I came back to my room, put the key in the lock and turned it, then watched the door go flying across the room to smash through the window and follow the TV down the six floors to the flowerbeds. The edge of the swiftly retreating key took a chunk out of my thumb, which I did not find funny.

Another time I couldn't get my door to open at all; I was getting wary by then, so I had the night porter come up and remove the door. When we got the door off eventually, we were faced with a blank, off-white wall, like solidified fog, except it was warm. Davey had filled the entire room with expanded polystyrene; he'd got a couple of big drums of the two fluids required, brought them in through the window with him, and just let them slosh out all over the carpet. What looked like a huge mutant mushroom of foam had extruded itself from my window.

Hotel managers hated Davey, but he always paid for all the damages, and he treated it as such a joke it was difficult to get really annoyed with him. Even the time with the foam-filled room, he'd booked me a replacement and moved most of my gear into it before carrying out the prank.

How they gave him a pilot's licence I'll never know, but they did. Davey bought a light plane, made sure his mansion in Kent came equipped with a grass strip and a hangar, and even went to the length of having a simulator installed to help him with his technique. I suspected he bribed somebody for the licence, but everybody I've talked to says that isn't possible. Maybe giving Davey a pilot's licence was the CAA's idea of a practical joke.

Mickey Watson seemed fairly normal compared to the rest of us; he turned up, drummed, went away again. He'd got married to a girl he'd known since primary school (a whirlwind romance nevertheless, on one of our sporadic returns to Scotland), and they were starting a family — that was why he wouldn't be at Wes' party that weekend; his wife had just gone into hospital to have their first kid. Mickey was always there when he was supposed to be; in the studio, at the rehearsal suite, on tour... but at the same time he seemed to be living on a different plane from the rest of us. To him, despite all the money and the fripperies, it was still just a job.

We took it seriously, in our own ways. We worked at being Rock Stars; not musicians, not even Personalities or ordinary Stars, but Rock Stars. It was a way of life, like a religion, like becoming a totally different person. We believed; we had an obligation to our public to behave like Rock Stars, off-stage as well as on, and we did our best, dammit.

Mickey took a different view. Occupation: drummer. End of story.

He's a farmer now, in Ayrshire, raising potatoes and wheat and big healthy children.

Christine was Christine. She achieved by accident what Davey was continually planning and striving for but never quite managing; they compared the others to her. Her voice had developed in range and power, but that was the least of it; what got them bouncing off the seats was the sheer guts she put into her performance. She growled and breathed and screamed her way through songs; always in control, still note-perfect, but bending and twisting her voice and the words and the tune into shapes and sounds I'd certainly never thought of. Took my breath away, and I heard it every night on tour; God knows what effect it had on anybody else, hearing it for the first time. Must have been like crawling out of the desert and being hosed down with iced champagne.

I think Christine could have sung a toothpaste jingle and made it sound quiveringly erotic, tearfully tragic or side-splittingly funny, just depending on how she felt that night; in her mouth, my words sounded like poetry, even to me. Just by changing her phrasing and the tone of her voice she could switch from making you think of a koala bear in tears to a wolverine on heat. Stunning. That was the only word that fitted. And she never lost it; even after the End, the Fall, when the band broke up, she just kept on going, formed her own band and more or less never stopped touring; singing and singing and singing.

Wes MacKinnon, one-time Hammond king, had taken, when on stage, to surrounding himself with vast numbers of synthesisers and organs and electric pianos and assorted other keyboards; banks of them, whole staircases of white and black keyed machines with coloured switches and blinking lights and LEDs. I sometimes wondered if Wes might have been happier as a drummer; he seemed to want to hide himself from the audience behind these ramparts of electronics (Mickey was heading in the other direction. He'd switched to transparent drums so the audience could see him better).

Wes didn't restrict his technophilia to the stage; he had a fetish, I think, about buttons and Light Emitting Diodes. He owned a succession of scientific calculators which offered longer and longer lists of functions Wes couldn't even pronounce let alone use, and a whole string of home computers, each one faster and more capacious and cheaper than the previous one; he had to have the latest, so as a rule he'd only just finished learning how to use one machine when he threw that out and bought a newer one.

He had an obsession with sound purity too (he now runs his own CD manufacturing plant and I think he's already got a prototype DAT cassette machine, smuggled out of Sony by a well-paid mole). Putting on a record was a small ritual for Wes. At home, he wore white gloves when he handled an album.

He finally brought his computer fetish and his mania for perfect sound together when he got hold of a used IBM mainframe and had recording-studio tapes transferred directly onto discpacks; he could then programme an entire evening's listening from his computer terminal. No scratches, no rumble, no tracking errors. Cost him well into six figures just for the hardware, and he was temporarily sickened when CD came out, but it kept him happy for a few years.

The IBM machine was installed in his house on the north Cornish coast, along with frightening amounts of surveillance equipment and some very powerful all-weather strobe lights...

'We need a bigger sound system, man.' I breathed in hard through both nostrils and faced into the darkness. My nose was numb, the back of my throat felt thick. I felt faster than a speeding innuendo and sharper than a rad-fem's tongue.

Both barrels. Here it comes. Columbian nirvana. I felt like the top of my head had been blown off and replaced with a diamond. 'What?' I said instantly, glaring at Wes. 'Bigger? You want a bigger sound system than we've got already? Are you crazy? We could knock small buildings down with the one we've got. Get anything more powerful and it'll be covered by the SALT agreement. We're registering as low-yield underground weapon tests already. Right now we use more electricity than some African countries generate; what are you trying to do; cause blackouts? You cornered the market in candles or hurricane lanterns or something? Christ almighty, have you seen the size of our speaker stacks? They're like office blocks; people live in them. There's a ten-person squat going on in the stage-left bass stack, didn't you know? Been there for two years and the roadies only noticed because the squatters applied to put in main drainage. What...'

'Calm down, man. Stop exaggerating.'

'You want to saddle us with fifty thousand law suits from people with no eardrums and you accuse me of exaggerating? Shee-it.'

We were standing on the long front porch of the house along the coast from Newquay. Wes didn't have a name for it yet. He was still thinking about it. I'd suggested 'The Plumbers' because the place overlooked Watergate Bay, but Wes didn't seem to think much of this idea, and I'm not even sure he'd heard of Watergate, at the time or since. 'Dunbuggin' might have been another name for the place, except that it could not have been less appropriate.

It was long after midnight and Wes' party was just starting to hit the plateau phase. Music thumped out from the big drawing room on the far side of the house. It was a dark, close night; no sign of stars or moon. The air smelled sweet and fresh, alternately scented by the land and by the sea, which could be heard but not seen, beating and crashing against the rocks a hundred feet or so from the house.

We stood looking out into the Atlantic darkness and shared a joint. Wes sat down at a garden table and fiddled about with the six-inch reflector telescope standing on the porch. God knows what he expected to see.

He'd been quiet for all of two seconds. I couldn't bear it.

'You want a bigger sound system?' I said, just to check.

'Well.' Wes looked thoughtful. 'Not necessarily bigger... just louder.'

'You're mad.'

'Maybe, Weird, maybe... but we're not loud enough. We need more decibels, man.'

'Hearing aids,' I decided. 'You've cornered the market in hearing aids and you're trying to drum up trade, or organ up trade. Well, it won't work. You'll have the Monopolies Commission and the anti trust people onto you. Not to mention the British Medical Association and the Food And Drug Administration. My advice to you is, forget it.'

'Do you know if any other bands are using electrostatic speakers?' Wes said thoughtfully. He looked through the telescope's eyepiece into the pitch-black overcast.

'Jesus, now he wants to electrocute us. You're a sick man, MacKinnon. There's something wrong with your filters; the white noise is coming through. Your brain's envelope is torn. Return To Zenda. Who is number one?'

'Give me that jay, Weird; you're gibbering.'

'God, I feel good. Could we go swimming? I feel like going swimming. Think anybody else would feel like swimming? Where's Inez; have you seen her? You want to come swimming?'

'Na, man. Don't do it anyway, like. You'd probably imagine you could swim to New York and we'd never see you again.'

'A length? No; I was only going to do a couple of widths. Want me to bring back some Guinness from Dublin?' I was jumping up and down by that stage, swinging my arms around in swimming motions.

'Na,' Wes said. He got bored with the telescope and turned to an FM radio lying on the table. He turned it on and it relayed the sounds of the party to us, muffled. He changed the frequency, then stopped when he found some panting noises. 'Hey man; listen. People humpin. Hey!' He looked up at me. I was still jumping up and down.

'You're sick. I told you. You are a sick and crazy man. That must be illegal. You'll get the jile.'

'No, man...' Weston grinned happily, listening to the sounds of a bed creaking and two people breathing heavily. I moved a little closer and stopped jumping up and down. I wondered if I could recognise the heavy breathing. It was getting quicker. 'That's beautiful, man.' He turned the frequency control again. I felt slightly disappointed. My arms and legs were sore but I started jumping up and down again. The radio relayed what sounded like people screwing again.

'Hot damn,' I said between jumps. 'There's a lot of it about tonight.' 'HOT DAMN. THERE'S A LOT OF IT ABOUT TONIGHT.' My own voice bellowed back from the radio and turned into a feedback howl. Wes chortled and switched the radio off again.

'That was you,' Wes grinned. 'There's a mike over the door, just behind you.'

I turned round and looked for it but I couldn't see it. 'You're still a deeply sick and disturbed man, Weston.'

'No, I'm just ahead of my time, Weird.'

'Bull...shit.'

'Suit yourself.'

Weston had bugged his own house. Every room. Totally wired for sound and broadcasting on all channels. He had bugs everywhere; from the old kitchen pantry to the new double garage. No bedroom or bathroom was spared. He'd even bugged the loft. Anybody with a good FM radio could pick up every sound in the house so long as they were within about two hundred feet. We all thought Wes was crazy, but Wes thought it was a great hoot.

'It's the future, man,' he'd tell you. 'In the future everything's going to be bugged. Telephones and offices and televisions and radios and everything, man. There'll be no way to stop it. They can fit bugs anywhere already. You know they can bug a room by shining a laser at the windows now? It's true, man. You'd better believe it. This is the future and you might as well get used to it now. Anyway; what's so wrong about hearing people fuck or crap? Everybody does it; there's nothing shameful about it, man; what does it matter? Why be shy of things most people do every day? It's crazy, man. They just want you to be that way so they can control you; they're getting inside your head, installing censorship circuits, and you're helping them. Just let it all hang out, man.'

Wes, you'll gather, felt he'd been born too late. He was a mid-to-late-sixties man really. Most people had moved on but Wes used his money to move both back to the past and forward to the future at the same time; anything other than stay in the present. Now I knew why his keyboard runs usually went in opposite directions at the same time.

Wes wasn't stopping at audio intrusion only. He had ordered camera equipment, he'd told me. First sound, then vision. Soon he'd have closed circuit TV in every room. Twenty channels in full colour, from cellar to rooftop view.

I sat down heavily on the top step of the porch. Wes handed me back the jay. I looked out into the darkness. The waves crashed beneath us. 'We need more light here,' I said suddenly. 'There's just too much darkness here. More light is required.'

'You want more light?' Wes said, in a strange tone of voice that made me look round suspiciously at him. 'I think we can fix that.' He sniffed in the sea salt smell, lifting his head and seeming to scent the air and listen to the beating waves for a moment, then he was out of the seat and marching down the lawn. 'Follow me, Weird.'

I followed him down to one edge of the lawn, almost out of range of the house lights. He pointed to a low wall which divided lawn from rocks. 'Sit there,' he said. 'Look down there.' I could hardly see where he was pointing, but it seemed to be down to the rocks.

'I'II just be a minute. Okay?' he said.

'Okay.' I sat and watched his shadowy form move back towards the house. I looked out to sea, straining to see anything other than darkness. After a while, using the edges of my eyes, I could just about make out the white surf falling through the night to the rocks, rolling on the unseen ocean.

Then there was a buzz, and the rocks lit up, flashing blue white.

The surf incandesced, brilliantly white. It happened again and again; a machine-gun fire of stuttering light bursting from large film-studio light stands, topped with strobes. They picked out the surging billows of the surf and chopped them up into single frames, staccato images of utter clarity punctuated with a darkness you could almost hear.

Waves rolled in, in stop motion, detonating against the ragged edge of rocks in freeze-frame sequences, spray falling back and the next roller coming in pinpoint percussions of light.

'Oh... wow!' I said, mouth hanging open. I looked to one side of the display, to see how much of the rest of the bay the strobes illuminated, and saw Davey Balfour, almost out of the range of the lights, and almost back into his jeans, which he was pulling on, running away along the rocks and into shadow.

In that shadow, for one instant of light, before she ducked back into the darkness, I saw Inez' face, neck and shoulders.

I shook my head. 'Hell, you could have said something,' I muttered to myself. The light show went on. The joint burned down and singed my fingers. Wes came down the slopes of grass towards me, face appropriately beaming.

'What d'you think, man?'

'Impressive,' I said, getting off the wall and walking up to him. 'Very impressive indeed.' I flicked the roach away into the darkness; it flickered under the strobes like something seen in an acid trip. 'Seen Jasmine?'