1 CARTER
C ARTER
In the hills of Yorkshire Dales, my mother and my brother are strumming guitars, side by side on a colorful picnic blanket beneath a tree.
His is a slightly smaller version, perfect for the hands of a growing boy, purchased at a secondhand store with money left over from groceries, saved in a biscuit tin.
The cool autumn air hints at the coming change of season, and the sun hits my mother’s shoulders in a way that forms a kind of golden glow around her.
It’s a hazy image, as early memories are, more of a moving snapshot than an actual memory.
A feeling. Comforting. Perhaps borrowing from a later memory, I hear my mother’s gentle voice humming along as she strums the strings with delicate fingers.
My brother, three years older, was a natural musician, people would say. “Born with a guitar in his hands and perfect pitch even when he cried,” they’d joke. I did my best to keep up, and sometimes I nearly did. A little, anyway.
My mother played all sorts of music—folk tunes, mostly, or church songs sometimes.
But my favorites growing up were when she’d strum her own version of popular songs that we might hear on the radio.
We’d copy her, and it would make us feel just a tiny bit cooler.
“Forever Young” by Alphaville was a favorite, I think.
I loved the sound of her voice above the finger-picked notes that sounded more like a music box than a rock ballad.
She was a secondary-school teacher, my mother.
She taught mathematics to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who learned to find beauty and art in all those numbers, in a small school outside the town of Ravensdale in northern England.
The scenes of my childhood are a combination of fern-covered hills, smoky mills beside tidy hamlets, and moorland that rolled into the distance to reach wide beaches beneath chalky coasts.
Our town sat between the country hills and the sea, nearly equidistant.
So we chose our weekend outings based on mood and weather.
We asked my mother once why she wasn’t a musician instead of a schoolteacher, and she didn’t answer.
But sometimes she would get a faraway look in her eyes that made me wonder if she was seeing herself in another life, perhaps on a small stage in a village pub somewhere, where fireside pints in the evening gave way to stage lights bouncing off long, straight brown hair, parted down the center.
She’d met my father when she was just seventeen, became pregnant shortly after, and was married by nineteen.
My father took a job at the local railroad company and worked up the ranks to management until the line closed down.
Then he just took work wherever he could get it.
Money was tight. Tensions and tempers were tighter.
But on days like the one I’m visiting in my memories now, beneath the tree with just my mother and brother, we could relax.
The music was our escape, something the three of us shared together like a private little club.
For the last hour, I’ve been telling this story and others like it to a journalist named Michael, seated in front of me on a long white leather bench, on a private plane high in the sky above the clouds, the evening dipping below the horizon.
A cameraman sits alongside him, occasionally filming as I speak.
It’s a sparse setup (the film crew, not the plane), but that’s what I like about it.
Nothing fancy. Just how we’d originally intended it to be years ago.
“So would you say that you got your talent from your mother, then?” Michael asks.
“Probably. But my brother was the one with all the talent. I just made do.”
“I’d say you made do pretty well.”
“I could come up with the music in my head, but I wasn’t always able to do what I wanted with it.
But he could play any instrument you put in his hands, and I knew I would never be that good.
I sort of figured out a way to make it work.
I would tune the guitar differently, so that the few chords I knew could turn into a lot more depending on the tuning.
It created a certain kind of sound that worked.
I played the piano without learning to read music. ”
“Who came up with the name Spurn Head as that first band name?” He laughs a bit, the name sounding more than a little ridiculous at this point.
Nearby, Tommy chuckles out loud and groans. The sound of Tommy’s laugh is one that could bring light to any weary soul. Not that mine is weary lately. But his optimistic nature certainly saved me in the past a few times.
“That was Jacob,” I say, sharing an amused glance with Tommy that softens at the end. It’s the first time I’ve said my brother’s name out loud in a long time, and the word feels slow and smooth on my lips. Names are spells. “Man, that was such a terrible band name,” I add, mostly to myself.
“It was you.” Tommy points at me and laughs again. “Jacob said you came up with it one night.”
“I did not.”
“I think maybe you did. Sorry to say.”
“It was him,” I say clearly, putting the subject to rest. “It was Jacob.”
“If you say so,” Tommy mumbles.
“Well, anyway, it didn’t stick, thankfully.”
“Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Mayluna,” Michael says with a smile.
“Definitely not.” But it was nice still, the name carrying me back to a different time, with sea salt and wild skies.
“There is this remote bit on the Yorkshire coast, a tidal island where our mum took us a few times, called Spurn Head. It feels a bit like the end of the earth, once you get there. There was a legend that people there had seen what appeared to be a star twinkling through the dark side of the crescent moon on some nights.” The first time I heard the story as a young boy, it fascinated me. It seemed magical.
“‘Moonstar,’” he says, naming a song from our first EP, the hit that got us our record deal a lifetime ago. I nod.
“My mum used to dream of having a little cottage nearby with a view of the sea.”
“Did she ever get it?”
“She did, as a matter of fact. It was one of the first things I bought her.” I wanted to buy her the moon and the stars and a palace.
But she just wanted that little cottage with a garden where she could grow old peacefully, with an eye toward the sea and plenty of constellations.
I think of her there, imagining an old guitar hanging on a wall, mostly collecting dust these days.
A flash of lightning hits the cabin, illuminating the rest of the seats that were dimmed in the front of the plane.
In its momentary brightness, which seems to last seconds rather than milliseconds, I see Tommy’s jaw clench tight and his knuckles grip the seat in such a minuscule way that you’d have to know him well in order to see it.
Shortly after we’d taken off from Mexico City, we’d hit some turbulence, and the pilot announced that there was weather up ahead but nothing to worry about.
I caught Tommy’s eye and nodded in reassurance.
He laughed it off and gave me a mock salute to let me know that he was all right.
He gets anxious. More so these days with a wife and small children at home.
He’s having a harder time leaving them, and he’s never been a big fan of airplanes, especially the kind like we’re on now.
Small, private ones. Neither am I, if I’m being honest. When I’m up in a plane, I can almost feel gravity’s fury at having been defeated, as if lying in wait, ready to bring it all back down to the earth where we belong.
We named her Lucy in the Sky, our private plane, a plush living room in the clouds.
We all celebrated the day we got her. “We’re big-time now, mates,” I remember Tommy saying.
But in truth, we missed our old tour bus sometimes.
Miss Penny Lane, we called her a lifetime ago.
“Not terribly creative in hindsight,” I say to Michael after mentioning the old bus and the coordinating names.
He has a studious look about him, a little rumpled and affable as he sits there with the passive intrigue that I recognize as a common trait in rock journalists.
When I finally agreed to the series of interviews that have been taking place, I wasn’t sure who was more surprised—him or me.
We seem too young for a retrospective. Are we really that old?
Not really, I was told, but people want to know our story.
See behind the curtain. And it felt cathartic.
Like a new beginning with old shadows left behind.
We decided together that it was time. It would be a benchmark before we began the path that headed toward becoming aging rock stars. (A frightening prospect.)
Michael laughs a little. “Eh, as band names and airplanes go, it could be worse. You could’ve painted a half-naked woman on the side of the plane.”
I smile. Something I’ve been doing more of in recent days. Levity returning to my body. “It can always be worse.”
The sky outside dims to a deeper navy, made darker by the imposing clouds sliding across its inky surface.
“So that’s more of the backstory,” I say, shrugging.
We’re discussing the start of the band and the album that launched it all.
Michael already knows a lot of the public details, but this interview will be a new perspective, one that will cover a bit more of the history and rise of our little group of friends that had gone from playing in tiny rooms at university to all of this.
Even now, it’s still hard to believe sometimes that we’re on our way to a sold-out stadium show in Rio.
Then on to Costa Rica, where we’ll finish out the last two shows of what’s been a long world tour.
We’re ready for a break. I lean back into the cushions of the bench and stretch my legs out in the expanse between us.