• We Are Toten Herzen -extract

  /Toten_Herzen • sample chapter • 09/06/2014 18:23:57 • link •

  In response to Mel Thorn's request to read an extract from We Are Toten Herzen, here's part of the chapter where Sony A&R man Jan Moencker is taken to meet the band for the first time.
  
  ---
  
  The police had blocked the road bringing the traffic out of Rotterdam to a crawl. The blue lights of emergency vehicles were multiplied in the raindrops across the windscreen forming flashing constellations before the wipers flicked them away. But back they came, again and again. There was an accident somewhere and a victim hidden in the confusion of hi-vis clothing. Bad night to have an accident, thought Jan Moencker. Bad timing too. He needed to get going, to get a result, but someone somewhere was conspiring against him.
  
  He was in the passenger seat of Rob Wallet's car being taken to a farmhouse a few kilometres east of the centre of Rotterdam, located in a hideously black countryside, which late at night was made all the more forbidding by the rain. Either side of the road there was nothing, no indication of life or where it might again emerge. Wallet had picked him up from his hotel near Central Station and was now taking him out into the void to meet the band. They had spoken a couple of times by phone and Moencker had insisted Sony might be ready to speak to them, but there was a snag that had to be sorted out first. "Did EMI give you a reason for not signing them?" asked Moencker as the accident scene rolled by. There was some activity behind the ambulance, nothing that could be identified.
  
  "It'll be a motorbike," said Wallet.
  
  "Uh?"
  
  "The accident. I bet it's someone come off their bike."
  
  "Oh, right."
  
  "EMI? No, nothing at all. I don't think I went about it the right way to be honest. I knew a guy there and thought I'd try to get an introduction, but when I met up with him he just said he couldn't get any interest from anyone who mattered. I was a bit too eager, I think. Didn't plan properly, just went at it. Then I knew I wasn't far from the Sanatorium Treatment office so went over there and wished I hadn't, to be honest. Spoke to a twenty year old so-called executive who asked me to put thirty thousand on the table before he'd even invite me in. He could have been the building's caretaker for all I know. It's been a long time since I've felt as old as I did when I was in there."
  
  "You're wasting your time with EMI anyway. They'll be gone in eighteen months. No use if you're planning to last longer than that." Moencker relaxed into his seat as the traffic passed the last ambulance and was waved off by a soaking wet policeman. A hundred metres farther on were three more officers stood around a prone motorbike, buckled and scratched, lying on its side like a dead two wheeled animal.
  
  "You were right," said Moencker. "You see a lot of these accidents do you?"
  
  "Call it insight," said Wallet. He put his foot down and accelerated into a wall of darkness.
  
  "So what do I need to know about these four?" said Moencker.
  
  Wallet gathered himself and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "Be honest with them. One thing I've learned is they don't like bullshit, don't like lies and liars. Susan is the decision maker, pretty much everything goes through her, so if you get her approval you're pretty much in. She can read people like a book so don't try to be clever with her. Dee Vincent reads books like a book. Never stops reading and talking, very mercurial, hard to get a straight answer out of her and I think sometimes it's a game she plays until she's ready to trust you. Rene is like a second opinion on everything. Susan has known him since childhood and trusts him more than anyone. I get the impression that he's like a, I don't know, a filter or a valve that keeps her on the straight, if you know what I mean."
  
  "Not really."
  
  "She can be very volatile. He's probably the only person who can make her see sense, but he's not always successful."
  
  "There's always one member with a stronger personality than the rest."
  
  "Don't get me wrong, she's not a tyrant, but she is the engine of the band. It was her decision to make the comeback."
  
  "She say why?"
  
  "Not in any way that I understood." Wallet looked at Moencker as if he had some insight, what the hell, he'd never heard of her a week ago.
  
  "There are four of them?" said Moencker.
  
  "Yeah," Wallet's hands gripped the wheel momentarily. "Elaine. All I can say is you'll have to make up you own mind about Elaine. She's scares the fuck out of me. Quiet. Hardly moves. I wouldn't like to be on the end of her temper. Then again, I don't think she needs an excuse to turn. Just step carefully around her."
  
  "The mad bass player. It's all fitting a pattern."
  
  "You've met bands like this before?"
  
  "Quite a few."
  
  Wallet turned to Moencker and grinned. "No you haven't."
  
  Moencker received a text. He read it and put his phone away. "What exactly do they want from this reunion?"
  
  "It's not a reunion because they never split up. It's a comeback. And what do they want out of it? I could only speculate. Maybe they got bored, maybe they need the money."
  
  "That's the usual reason. And why are you here?"
  
  Wallet entered that zone where the driver of a car is so deep in thought that it almost drives itself. "A sense of achievement. I want to achieve something in life. When you write about music, or anything for that matter, for as long as I have you start to get frustrated and want to be closer to it, part of it. You want to cross over from spectator to performer or at least part of the production and make it happen. The chance came my way and I took it. It was a risk, but I could see my life ahead of me and it looked like this road."
  
  The car was taking them both along an illuminated strip of tarmac no more than twenty or thirty metres in length and beyond that there was nothing. An unbearable unknown gloom. When they did finally arrive at the farmhouse there was evidence of life, but it was extraterrestrial. The cloud was breaking up and glimpses of constellations normally dimmed by the latent light of the city were hanging like tiny beads of light filled raindrops, their patterns gradually emerging out of the background. That's where all the light had gone, up there, to illuminate those stars and nebulae and gas clouds, leaving this part of the earth as black as the deepest pit and as quiet as a tomb. Moencker wanted to do the deal and get away.

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