FOUR SUMMERS, part seven

1994, continued

So, what happened during the rehearsals for the Byact version of "Blood Wedding", apart from actually preparing for the forthcoming performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival? Well, amongst everything else, there was one more party that deserves a mention here. That was the one at my house, only a week after a few of us had sat down to watch all three Star Wars films back-to-back, and two days after we’d drunk tequila slammers at Zoë Knights’ house.

In my 1994 diary, I didn’t write at all during the fortnight that my parents were on holiday – I merely recapitulated everything on the night that they got back. Here’s how I described the party at my house on Wednesday, 20^th July, 1994:

"My party. A really crazy night, with good, bad, intriguing, and disgusting things occurring, often simultaneously. Matt, Ben, Rod, Neil, Beth, Andy, James, Steve, Dan, Kate, Anna (more later!), Celia, Paul Lewin, Steve and Liz, Ian, Keir, Danny Heffer, Eddie, Chris, Luke, Vicci, Pete, Alex, Alex, Graham Stokes, Helen, Helen, and Ben Parkinson were there. Good bits – Anna kissing me as she left (I still haven’t come down yet; once again, I am crazy about her), Keir and me playing our songs, and seeing the bizarre mix of people getting on. Bad bits – Liz being sick, Danny Heffer throwing eggs, toilet paper, lard, and other horrible things, and worst of all, Anna Kate, and Celia leaving really early."

It would take far too long to elaborate on this brief précis of a great night – identifying all the guests and giving a brief character study would take until the summer of 2010, if not longer. I fear the story of Liz, the doormat, and a puddle of puke is best left imagined, as is the appalling state of the house after Danny and his mates had decided to chuck what seem to be the ingredients of a quiche around the place. Ironically, one ended up on the bonnet of one of the other guests’ cars, where the following day in the morning sun it cooked to a crisp. Ridiculously, by the time this unplanned vehicular fry up had occurred, the egg was probably the last bit of food left on the premises. Pretty much the entire contents of the kitchen, pantry, and freezer had been emptied, cooked, and consumed – or used in the food wars. Certain food receptacles also disappeared during the course of the party – a tin used for the storage of flour later turned up over half a mile away, the how and why of its journey forever unexplained.

However, there are two things from this diary entry of a different age that are worth expanding upon. Regular readers (both of them) will remember that in previous instalments of this series, I’ve mentioned Kate (Riddles) and Celia (Ukario) as girls I’d had a crush on at various points in the recent past, and I’m pretty sure such feelings resurfaced again later on in the year. But by the time my party took place, Anna Crawford had become my grand passion of the summer, and everything that happened from then on, through the rehearsals, the trip to Edinburgh itself, and the return home, plus the Reading festival, and the final end of this great season, took place against the backdrop of my feelings for Anna. It wasn’t love, or anything, but it was more than a crush, and at the time, being the eternal romantic that I was, it was pretty much everything to me, and getting a goodnight kiss from her sent my head spinning like an out-of-control helicopter and my heart leaping like a terrified rabbit. A song I wrote about her at the time was, somewhat grandiosely, titled "This Kiss For The Whole World", the notion of the song being that I’d give anything and everything in exchange for one kiss from Anna – could anything be more teenage than that? The title I’d adapted from the name of a Gustav Klimt painting, which I’d received as a postcard from Lindsay Ross, theatre studies tutor and director of "Blood Wedding" – she sent one to each member of the theatre studies group at the conclusion of our course, with each one bearing a different painting that was, one supposes, somehow relevant to its’ recipient. I’ve never really known quite what "Here’s a kiss for the world" has to do with me, but I’ve had my suspicions. If you want to try and see what it says about David Lewis, here’s what it looks like:

The song was one of several I’d written both the words and music to as my fledgling guitar abilities developed, and a word about music is the second thing that needs expanding upon from the diary entry of the night of my party. If you’ve read The Soundtrack Of Those Days elsewhere on the Vervoid, you’ll be aware that the Keir mentioned in the diary is Keir Whittaker, with whom I had formed what we hoped would be the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world ever. Sadly, If you’ve read The Soundtrack Of Those Days, you’ll also be aware that such a dream was never fulfilled, but at the time, the disappointing end of this great songwriting partnership was an inconceivable impossibility. I can’t remember which of our songs we played at the party, but I do recall that in the lounge of my house, as the sun was just starting to set over a beautiful mid-summer evening, Keir and I sang a few of the tunes from our repertoire to a few of the guests, who were mightily impressed. Or at least, that’s how I like to remember it.

To digress just slightly, as I’ve done so many times before in this story, I’m going to mention one more party (the penultimate one you’ll hear about) that took place at the house of Dan Foley on the last day of July, a Sunday. Since the party at my house, Dan had become the bass player in our fledgling band - it sticks in the memory because Dan’s house wasn’t in Loughborough, but in a village at the foot of Beacon Hill, a local landmark, and in at some ridiculous time in the early hours, after the rest of the guests had gone to bed, myself, Dan, and a friend of his, Simon, took a wander up the hill, armed only with a guitar and some cans of beer. From Beacon Hill, one can see a strangely beautiful street-light-lit panorama of Loughborough, and all its surrounding environs, and it inspired a new song for the band, entitled "You and I".

I bring this up here because it was one of the last complete songs that Keir and I ever wrote, and the only thing about this summer that had any relevance to the future, rather than the past, or the immediate present, was the fact that Keir and I had this great thing going musically, and, as I’ve said, we were convinced had a future in rock ‘n’ roll, with all the stardom and critical acclaim attached to such a beautiful dream.

"You and I" may have been one of our only songs not to have appeared on a tape Keir and I made of our repertoire which we gave to Dan to learn, and sadly it was, apart from a more professionally made three track demo, it was the only real recordings we ever made, and I often wonder whatever became of it. Most likely, at some juncture after the band dissolved, Dan either taped over it, or lost it, as so often happens with cassettes of things no longer wanted, or needed. But a secret part of me occasionally likes to think that it’s still out there somewhere, either in Dan’s possession or someone else’s, and that those skeletal recordings of "Caught In A Storm", "Riding So High", "Nothing Changes", "Universe Inside", "Never Understand", "Ghostlike", "Somewhere Like This", and maybe one or two others, can still be listened to by someone, and perhaps enjoyed as a snapshot of something that was nearly beautiful, that was, to quote one of these songs, "stuttering blindly on the edge of heaven."

Digression over – in fact, all digressions are over now. There are many more things that happened during the rehearsals for "Blood Wedding", both in the Burleigh College drama studio and in our private time; but they are peripheral now to what the group was looking forward to and dreading equal measure – the trip to the Fringe Festival to perform the play. A play that wasn’t even half ready for performance, as the rehearsals had been mainly taken up with endless group trust and bonding exercises, and physical movement work, involving the thirty or so chairs that were the only set the play had. As for the nitty gritty of the individual scenes, many of them were still unrehearsed, and by the time the day of departure came around, it was the dread that was paramount in the minds of myself and my colleagues – would it somehow drag itself out of the mire and be a resounding success, or would it be a dismal disaster? The journey to Edinburgh begins in the next episode of Four Summers.