Larkin 25 - Popstar By Ray Moody

He reflected, 'Hadn't he always been so near yet so far?' Wasn't he there right at the start with The Beatles? They might have had their Mersey Beat but hadn't he been part of the Humber Beat, and wasn't water, water? The trouble was that nobody else wanted it, Did any agents, record companies or managers, bother coming to this city? You can bet your life that they didn't! Then it had all gone psychedelic and they'd dressed up like Indian princes and got stoned, The problem was that nobody believed that you could have a psychedelic experience and live so close to Scunthorpe.

Next came Glam, and they'd tarted themselves up in tinsel and make-up and pouted their lips like deranged Drag Queens, That soon died away, thank goodness, and they'd got out their old rocker leather jackets, stuck a few more studs in them, got rid of the keyboards, forgot half the chords and called the music 'Punk', They tried looking aggressive, and began snarling and gossing on the audience and when that died away, they finally became what they had become, Adults playing rock music. And in all of that time, he'd been through more than 30 line-ups, He bet that he'd stared at the back of more musicians than anyone else in Britain. He should be in the Guinness Book of Records, Famous for staring at a load of backs, Finally, when the last band had split, he'd looked at himself in the mirror Stared at his lines and receding hairline and thought, that he'd had enough, It was over; it was time to pack it in. But he couldn't stay where he was, So he'd come back, Back here to where it had all began, But back to what? A pokey bedsit, the social, a tight budget and if he was lucky a telly, The trouble was he wasn't young anymore, He didn't know anyone or anything, It had all changed, He should never have returned, But what else could he do, live a lie in the big city? Pretend, so that anyone who ever knew him, might occasionally think, I wonder what happened to so and so? I bet he's famous, Probably walking the streets of the Big Apple right now on his way to the studios to lay down a few tracks, Or, 'I bet he's got a flat in London and a house in the country', They'd soon lose that image if they saw him now, 'So that's what 40 years of rock 'n' roll does for you then', 'So they don't all end up looking like Cliff Richard!' 'Thank god we stuck to the mortgage and the 9 - 5!' Perhaps he might even get one of them coming up to him saying, 'Didn't you used to be ... and he'd feel like shouting 'I still am!' What future had he got to look forward to? None! He sometimes wondered whether it had all really happened, and if it did, then where did it go? Had everyone grown old he wondered, Or was it just him? All he had left to cling on to was his past, He was clutching at his Beatles records, yet he wanted to shout, 'Yeah, Yeah, bloody, Yeah!' He was frightened of the present, and of the future He wanted to see Mohammed Ali fight again, Wanted to shout, 'Come back Joe Bugner, all is forgiven' He required familiar things, He wanted to know what had become of that athletic guy he use to read about in The Victor comic 'Alf Tupper, The Tough of The Track', Did all those fish and chip suppers, he used to train on, finally give him a heart attack? Or, did he simply just run into obscurity? He pined for the early days again, To hear the Shadows play 'Wonderful Land' or the Animals 'House of The Rising Sun, He wanted to feel those shivers run down his spine, those he had first felt over 40 years ago, He wanted it to be the great days of 1969/70 He wanted to experience again the innocence of 1967 and not the reality of now, He had no future, only a past, He was tired, he didn't even own a bike, he fell asleep ... No one was there to see him off at the station he was sneaking away, back from whence he came back into obscurity No one would ever know that he had returned. He stared around him at the huge empty shell of a station surrounding him It had once been busy, now only a few trains left every day He wondered at all the hellos and goodbyes that must have been said on those platforms, All those beginnings and those ends, He wondered at all the soldiers that must have gone off from there to war, They must have leaned against those same pillars, stood on those same platforms, Their wives and mothers waving them off for that last time, That final view of them leaning out of those train carriage windows, never to return He reflected, 'He was the nearly man and that's all he ever would be' Then like all those soldiers before him, He boarded the train for that last time And as the train slowly pulled away from the station He thought to himself, 'There'd be a band' There would always be another band.

Copyright © Ray Moody 2010

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