9 CARTER
C ARTER
“Fame wasn’t coming naturally to us, mostly because it happened so quickly.
For years, we had just been a group of boys playing to small venues for fun.
A few of us were at university, planning sensible careers and such.
I was studying the philosophy of mathematics and astronomy, nearly obsessively.
If music was the heart of me, part of my soul, then the study of the cosmos was my mind.
I would have been content enough on either route, I suppose. ”
“But then?” Michael asks.
“But then we did a small gig in Camden Town, just a few songs really, and there happened to be someone important in the room. That’s how it happens so often for bands, you know.
Right place, right time, right person—all aligning perfectly in sync, as if orchestrated by a greater hand.
In the span of a few weeks, we had signed a record deal, were on the radio, and launched onto stages as the opening act for bands we’d looked up to as heroes.
It was disorienting. We had broken up for a while and just gotten back together with new songs and a new name.
And it happened so fast. The EP, then Paramour Records, then the tour.
In most cases, bands expand outward, soaking up the rays of the sun and reflecting them in every direction.
But us, we were the opposite, and fame made us want to draw inward, contract, and hide from it all.
Obviously, this created a promotions problem.
Still, the tide continued carrying us into bigger waters, and before you knew it, we were in America, opening for The Evolution—a band we’d grown up listening to. ”
“But they were one of our more cautionary tales, mind you—inspiring as much as warning us,” Tommy adds.
“In what way?” Michael asks.
“I guess we didn’t want to end up a mess,” he replies.
“Speak for yourself.” Alex has opened his eyes, crossing his hands over his hips while offering a snigger that crinkles his eyes a little.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I used to look at Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and great bands that had crumbled and think, They seem like such a wreck. All those drugs and the sheer decadence. I don’t want to end up like that. ”
“And I’d look at the same pictures and think, Yeah, but that’s what made the music turn out to be so legendary ,” Alex says, completing the circle of thought.
“Ah, that does explain a lot.” Michael is absorbing this. “Quite a split there.”
“Angels and demons.” Tommy reaches over to pour a beer and leans back into his seat. “There needs to be both in life. Without one, the other gets uninteresting pretty damn fast.”
“We had already been through a lot, and we weren’t even all that famous yet.
So I worried about what it would cost us.
Maybe that’s why we were hesitant. I also just didn’t much trust the press in any way.
But like I said, she was different. She could get the story behind the music, not just the artifice the band wanted people to see, so it made people talk to her when they wouldn’t otherwise. ”
Michael doesn’t hide his surprise. “Are you saying she was a journalist?”
I nod, and he absorbs this information, the irony of it.
“But we hoped to get to a point where the music would stand on its own, and that someone in some town, listening to our album in their bedroom, would hear it and not give a damn who said what about us.”
There was a time when music was something simpler—a soundtrack playing alongside life—songs on the radio, advertisements and jingles, the strums of my mother and brother, I continue telling Michael.
But then, maybe around the age of twelve or thirteen, that all changed for me, like a recessed gene becoming activated.
It became part of my inner world, impressing itself upon my DNA and weaving into my soul, whispering at all hours of the night like ghosts in a hall.
I began spending every penny I could spare in the Crossroads Records, the nearest store to carry the kind of albums I craved.
Splitting them with Jacob. Using what I heard to teach myself to play, to become the sound, to absorb the feelings between the notes.
This was my relationship to the music. But then, in a relatively short span of time, an intersection had formed when it crossed over into a path seemingly paved with opportunity—my private world put on display in front of thousands of people.
I had a nearly obsessive desire to keep it close to me back then, I think partly out of fear that if I spoke of it too much, it would be lost. It’s been years now, of course, so I’ve learned to balance it all a little more.
But back then, I tried to avoid talking about our experience or the music. Until that day, really.
“We were playing our first show at Jones Beach, which, even to a few boys from Britain, was absolutely iconic,” I continue.
I know we’re presently on our way to play a sold-out stadium of 70,000 people, but I still remember the 15,000-seat Jones Beach experience as a momentous accomplishment.
Which it was at the time. “In terms of American venues, it was up there with the Hollywood Bowl and Madison Square Garden and Red Rocks, even if we were just the opener. But as visually impressive as it can be, with all that water and concrete and sky, the backstage area is a claustrophobic corridor of humid sensory overload, and there was a heat wave that day. Have you been there?”
Michael nods. “Sure. A number of times. And I know what you mean.”
“There’s this spot outside one of the back doors, where you end up on a narrow strip of walkway that sort of hangs just over the water.
It’s on the back of the building, out of view.
” I draw the curvature of the building with the tip of my finger on the armrest beside me.
“There’s a nice breeze and something resembling a bit of quiet, along with the sound of seagulls.
So that’s where I was for most of that day.
A few years later, I found out about the hidden tunnel beneath the water that connects the front of house to backstage. But even I’m not that dismal.”
“He does this. Whatever venue we’re in, you can count on him to go hide in a nook far away. It is literally the most annoying thing ever when it’s time for sound check,” Tommy explains to Michael. “Especially because he never has his phone on him.”
“I’m not hiding exactly. But otherwise, he’s not wrong,” I say.
“It’s often the very top row of a stadium these days. Nobody going to find you up there. Except me, of course. But I know where to look.”
“Remind me to get more creative with my locations,” I joke to Tommy before continuing. “That day, I heard Ian from The Evolution finishing up sound check and knew we’d be up soon, so I went inside. I simply walked through a door, and that was it.”
Everything changed.
“When I first saw her, I—”
“You mean when I first saw her,” Alex corrects me. His eyes have closed again, a napping panther. I smile at the long-running joke between us. He’s right. Out of all of us, he saw her first.
“Freddie had something to do with it all too,” Tommy adds, and I nod in agreement and continue.
“At first, I didn’t know what she did for a living or why she was there at the time. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I would have told her anything that day, I think.”