EllroyJones

The Bistro is a club that has never lost its character. It is above an amusement arcade. Only truly great, or remarkably dreadful, places can boast that.

The owners have doggedly refused to update it in any way, believing that the time would come when it would be hip again. They are wrong to think this as evidenced by the fact that no one goes there. I have been reliably informed of this by the orange girl who works at Sea (sic) Records off the high street.

But tonight there is a crowd. A big one. Not Monsters of Rock big, sure (and I have attended that fine institution no less than twelve times, with nine different acts), but it takes half an hour to get a drink and half of it is spilled before I even get close enough to the stage to catch a glimpse.

The band plays. They are full of confidence, the front man has a swagger that isn’t just posturing. The crowd knows the lyrics.

The crowd is young and I don’t fit in. A piece of advice from my mother on the topic of nightclubs: If you are ever in a room surrounded by people less than half your age you are either a teacher or a paedo. Either way you need to take a very hard look at your life.

No one here seems to recognise me. I am startled by a creeping unease that pulls me into a slump. I have stood in front of crowds many times this size and announced that the band will not be performing due to any number of improbable circumstances. But that Ellroy Jones seems to be tiring.

The drink must go. I’ve never been much of a drinker. I once vomited in a handbag of shit. That was a dark day.

It’s too hot in the club, I can feel sweat pooling cold at the base of my back. The band’s been playing for twenty minutes.

I push my way through the crowd, into the hallway and over to the open fire escape. I go out and let the cool night envelope me. I feel nauseous. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I lean over the railing and dry heave. At first I think someone must have spiked my drink, but then realise that a. the drink tasted fine, and; b. in these hard economic times people just aren’t as generous with their drugs anymore.

“Too hot for you?” a familiar voice says. I turn and see the girl from the record shop, the mental one. “So you’ve come to check out the band?”

I shrug. “Just chillin’, hearing what sounds are out there.” A man my age cannot pull that sentence off when he is drooling.

“They’re great,” she says, with that all-teeth-smile of hers. I see now what it is about her that unsettles – her eyes. They are the largest, most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. And they never move, the lids never close.

“Sounding good,” I say. “Got a good crowd.”

She’s wearing a Clandestinian T-shirt, a band I once managed. It is old and faded. Over that, a trendily too-small blazer, tight jeans below.

“You want to sign them?” she said. “You can be their manager.”

“We’ll see,” I said with a raised eyebrow that I knew even as I did it would make me squirm when I looked back on this conversation.

“You still in touch with the Clandestinain guys?”

“Not really.”

“When did you last see Kirk? I love Kirk. Guess how many times I saw them play.”

“I’m guessing lots.”

“No, guess! A number.”

“Twelve?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Wow.”

“He touched me at four of them.”

“Okay, then. Wow.”

“Can you introduce me to him?”

“I’ve not seen him in…God, I don’t know.”

“They split five years ago.”

“I’ve not seen him in five years.”

“Don’t you think Backspace sound a bit like them? They’re fucking awesome. You won’t get near them after the show, you know. They’ll play for another hour at least, more like two, then they get mobbed. Everytime.”

“I can push my way through.” Thinking God I can’t go back in there.

“I know the drummer,” she said. “I know where they practice.”

She had me. “Do you?”

“Yes. I’ll do you a deal?”

I should have seen the manipulation, the direction she was taking me in. I was too tired to dodge it. “Go on.”

“I’ll introduce you to Steven if you introduce me to Kirk.”

I nodded and she was kind enough to rub my back as I vomited onto the alleyway below. 

My landlord doesn’t tend to knock. He says it’s because he has no knuckles on his right (knocking) hand, but I see no reason why he can’t use his elbow (if not his left hand).

What followed was his usual abrasive words-as-weapons monthly tirade.

I started with my usual, sunny, “Ah, Mr. Dragoon, why don’t you come in,” as he was already in the kitchen and looking in my fridge (he never takes anything, just looks in it. I’ve never known what for). He is not the sort to recognise sarcasm.

He said, “What you doin’ in here, Mr Jones?”

“In the flat, or the fridge specifically?”

“I don’t want drugs in my building.”

Then no one would live in your building. I didn’t say it.

“Well you won’t find any in here,” I said. Then I added: “Mr Dragoon,” out of the deference being about to fork over four hundred quid to someone gives me to them.

“You,” he said, stabbing a finger that he no longer had at me, “can call me Michael. Or Mike. No, Michael.”

“Fine, Michael. And you can call me Ellroy.”

“No, I’ll call you Pal. And you’ll listen. Who when I say listen, Pal, you’ll pay attention.” He looked at where his fingers used to be to compose himself. “Listen, Pal, you and I are men of the world. Me, I’ve been running blocks like this since I had fingers and you had smooth balls. You, you’ve been doing your music thing—“

“Band managemet.”

“Listen, Pal. When I’m talking, you’re not…talking. You get me?”

He raised his eyebrows too indicate it was more than just a rhetorical questions and I was actually expected to fill this silence, so I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “We know the way things go, you just gotta put up with them, nothing you can do.  You just go along with them. Like the weather and restraining orders. You follow me?”

I didn’t. “Yes.”

“Good. Now listen, blinky. You know what I think there is in this building?”

Was it a yes/no question or an actual answer-required situation? His eyebrows told me I was taking too long so I put on a serious face and half nodded, which seemed to do.

“Drugs,” he said.

“I told you I don’t have any.”

“And I told you to listen, chin-arse. See people I do, at night usually. Day time too though. Acting weird, hoods up, hands in their pockets, stopping and talking on the stairs maybe, too close to each other like.”

“They could be flirting I said.”

His eyes narrowed. “They were both blokes.”

“It’s 2012,” I said and knew it was the wrong thing to say only once the words were out there, strung between us like razor wire.

“Must be drugs,” I said quickly and took him back off on his tirade.

What followed was a long and moist barrage of words forming his vitriol about narcotics.

I didn’t want to say so? Because that would have seemed dismissive and antagonistic, so I raised one eyebrow and cocked my head to the side.

“I want to know what’s going on,” he said. “And I think you’re the man to help me.”

“Me?”

“We’ve been around the world. We know people, what goes on here—“ he banged his stub between his eyes. “We know the sort. It’s like us and them, like a game. Like chess.”

“Ah, chess.” A pause as I floundered desperately for something to deflect his narrowing lazer-gaze. “Do you play?”

“Did I say Chess? I meant Subbuteo.”

“Still a fine game. Would you like a drink?”

“You’ll be my eyes, my ears, my nose.”

“I think I’ll have a drink.”

By the time I was actually drunk he had left. I sat in the chair I keep next to the window and looked down on the street, two storeys below, and asked myself things:

1.       If the girl that had walked past three times was actually the same girl at all, or three different girls-of-the-day and I was now so removed from the culture of the world I was once so deeply embedded in that I hadn’t even noticed it had left me behind, alone and insular and looking at it without knowing it was its back I was gazing to; and,

2.       How could I, if I were to at all, carry out Dragoon’s request; and,

3.       If I called one of my ex-wives would any one of them actually take my call; and,

4.       What had happened to the town I had grown up in? Why had I returned to it of all places, and how had it faded? Were the people of the town blindly walking through it, swallowed up so deeply that its rot had blinded them to its very existence as it gorged on the walls and streets;

5.       Would Backspace return my Email and give me a shot;

6.       If I could sleep with any woman who passed the window, which would it be? An Asian girl in a tweed skirt took top place and after thirty minutes no one had toppled her.

And so, with the alcohol-mirror placed firmly and uncomfortably in front of me, the loathing only interrupted by the hazy sexual mores of boredom which sent wisps of anaesthetic to my mind, I drank some more and fell asleep. 

In the world of band management one thing is a must – talent.

I have worked with some of the best in the business. And I can help you, too. Just send me a link to one of your tracks. Make it a good one – this is your opportunity. Many people these days are eschewing the management route for TV reality contests. I would like to point out that that is not the way to foster a long and fruitful career in music.

I once met a young man with quite an exceptional voice. I took him under my wing, we did a few club gigs, cut a demo. And then he brutally stabbed me in back and repayed my kindness, belief, loyalty, sweat, blood, tears and free minutes by entering just such a show.

And you know what? He won.

I won’t tell you his name, to do so would be crass, but you’d know him if you saw him. And do you know where he is now? Iceland. First he did the ads, now he actually works in the back room in the one in the precinct in Rhyl. I hear he’s sniffed all his jungle money up his nose and is back with his mum.

Point is – a career is built on many things, and one of those things is integrity.

I have integrity. Email me. 

I am often asked if I play any instruments myself. The answer is ‘no’. There are two reasons:  One, I never learned to play any; and, two, does a puppet master learn to dance like a marionette?

 I was asked this question earlier on.  Being B.B. (see previous entry) I was filling today checking out a local record shop (store) for some underground tunes. Underground is where to find tomorrow’s hits, and next decade’s hits of the previous decade. One of my ex-wives used to joke that I was so underground it was amazing I didn’t have tiny useless eyes and large paws with which to shovel earth around whilst burrowing. The stupid slut.

In the shop (store) the orange-skinned, purple-haired, multi-pierced and thoroughly obnoxious girl pretending to be too cool to care while carefully scratching her eye so as not to disturb the smudge of her eye makeup, looked at me like I was her father or something. Jokes on her, because I actually might be. I’ve often thought she looked uncannily like a younger version of the woman from the services on the M6, who in her heyday was reputed to have been nicknamed The Welcome Party, because whenever anyone came there she was.

Anyway, I spent a time idly browsing the racks, but nothing grabbed me. I have eclectic tastes (as evidenced by the broad list of bands I have represented over the years), but some of this stuff was just shit.

All of a sudden someone grabbed my arm. I turned and was face-to-face with a young girl who was much shorter than me (actually, then, face-to-chest). She was cute in that sort of way that some girls are – if she were backstage she would most likely have ended up with the bassist.

“You’re Ellroy Jones, aren’t you?” she said.

I nodded, looked down at the records that were in my hand.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Making a pizza,” I said.

She laughed. Looking back on it now, her laugh might have relegated her from being with the bassist to the T-shirt guy (the prick).

“I’m checking out bands,” I said. “Got to keep my hand in.”

“In what?”

That made me pause because I couldn’t work out if she was begin funny or not. A moment’s awkward silence in which she had, and then missed, her chance to crack a wry smile, and I decided she was perhaps better suited to the bus driver.

She looked at me wide-eyed. No, she really did want an answer to the question.

“In the scene,” I said. “The music scene.”

“You’re scouting for new bands? That is so cool. How about…” she ran to the other side of the shop (store), plunged her hand into one of the racks, then ran back to hand me a CD.

“Backspace,” I read. “They any good?”

“Yes.”

“You like them?”

“Yes.”

Always with the smile, tight teeth.

“You’ve never heard them, have you?”

“Yes,” she said again.

I was trying to work out if she meant Yes, I’ve heard them or agreeing with me, when she added, “They’re local.”

“Great,” I said, debating whether she would attack me if I put the CD back. Music is like food – if locally-sourced is so bloody great why can’t they sell the shit anywhere else?

I decided to buy it and leave.

What was perhaps the most uncomfortable part of all this was that as I moved over to the counter, the girl stayed rooted to the spot and watched me. Then caught me up at the till. The orange girl scanned the CD in with a scoff that she very carefully tried to make out she was hiding.

“Well,” I said to the girl as I took the CD. “I hope it’s good.”

This surely was the end of the conversation.

“Do you still manage The Clandestinians?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Artistic differences.”

“But surely it’s the band who has…”

“Bye,” I said to the shop as a whole and hurried out. Outside I took my mobile (cell) phone out and started having a boisterous conversation into it, so that the girl couldn’t talk to me. When it rang we both knew I’d been caught and there really was no coming back from it. I put the call to voicemail. It was the bank, anyway,

“I’m going home now,” I said.

“Okay,” she said and started to walk with me.

“Alone,” I said.

“Can you introduce me to the band?”

“I have a meeting.”

I decided against going home and sat in an internet café for two hours first. For the first ten minutes or so I felt confident that she was sitting next to me, but after that it became uncomfortably like she was sitting with me. In that time I clarified as clearly as I could that any rumours regarding missing T-shirt monies on a certain Asian tour were erroneous and that the assault charges were dropped. Just to be clear here, the T-shirt guy actually attacked me with a plastic coat hanger and, in self defense, I hit him with a nearby fire extinguisher.

I then explained to her the growing dissatisfaction I already had with the musical direction the band were going in (I’m all for progressions and experimentation, but no one actually likes sitar, they just say they do), and how their lack of professionalism was actually bringing my career down; and downgrading their venues from concert halls to clubs was actually a (misunderstood) canny move to allow us to advertise the dates as “sold out”.

The café owner started making most unhelpful contributions to the discussion. Of her many unsolicited mantras it was You had an adverse face ratio with your people, you should have had Incentivise time and bounced that idea package around the room that made me order the bill. When I requested that we split it, the girl pointed out that she had only had a latte, while I had had a mocha and a blueberry muffin.

Then she left.

The café owner kept the fifteen pence change without asking (I was horrified to see her put it in one of those charity boxes shaped like a dog ) and pointed out that If you don’t have CARE in your CAREER, all you have is ER. I pointed out that in the last two hours she had had two customers and sold 2 drinks and a muffin. I also flashed my mobile phone at her, but I don’t think she got the point. (The point was that I have internet on my phone, just like the rest of the fucking country.)

When I got home I listened to Backspace. I will Email them tomorrow. 

So here we are, blogging. It’s been some time since I felt so connected to the world. I have stood on some of the world’s biggest stages making excuses for some of the world’s biggest musicians, but nothing compares to this stage. So, World at Large, here I am, Ellroy Jones at your service.

I am one of the world’s premier entertainment managers. This is a fact. A simple Google of my name will tell you that. It will also link you to a Facebook page set up in my name. ***This is not me. I do not have a Facebook account***. The account was set up by a disgruntled ex-bassist in a band I used to manage. Funny story actually – we were in Singapore when the original bassist got banged up for chewing gum. When they searched him they found his heroin and that was that. They shaved his head and beat him, which, ironically, he didn’t feel as he was strung out to hell on heroin. He still laughs about it to this day, or so I’ve heard. It’s not actually funny of course, but when you’ve spent the last seventeen years in a concrete box and no longer have fingernails it must do something to you.

Anyway, so this woman musician comes in one day and has a bass. She could play it well despite her small fingers, and as we were due to play that night she got the gig. It wasn’t long before she was a fixture – her playing, attitude, and steadfast refusal to wear a bra, made her a real hit with fans and crew alike.

I’m digressing here, suffice to say, rock and roll and periods don’t mix. The tribunal was a sour note to end our relationship on, but that’s the way she wanted it. To my mind, the fact that she won says more about the legal system than my own actions. I had thought that one day we might reconnect, but this latest Facebook stunt of hers (following on so shortly from her Twitter account, Ellroy Jones is a prick)  has made me think twice.

While I’m on the topic of this sort of thing, yes, it is true that I am currently B.B. (Between bands), but this is a matter of personal choice following a break down in relations with the previous band I managed. Both sides felt it was time for a new direction; them downwards to the obscurity bin at an Oxfam shop (inevitable), me to the premiership of band management (equally as inevitable). I wish them all the luck in the world and may their integrity steer them safely from any lucrative sports-tie ins and firmly into the chin-stroking realms of student bars they so clearly hunger for. It is natural that when a band reaches such a decisions-making era of their career there will be fall out, and I am proud to say that I gracefully stepped down and the subsequent legal proceedings brought against me for withholding royalties will leave no hard feelings.

And let me be clear: All monies due to them were paid and the fact that they have delayed the hearing date while they desperately  dig for more evidence speaks volumes. It is a testament to my accountant’s thorough and diligent organisation that the disputed funds are proving untraceable. That’s because there are no funds, boys! The Twitter feed, Ellroy Jones is a thief and racist, while impressively written for a medium that only allows 160 Characters, is missing one crucial aspect – I never stole a thing in my life apart from a few kisses (and I’m not a racist – I love Hip hop and basketball and once masturbated to Grace Jones in Mad Max 3, Beyond Thunderdome)  and I can prove that by the fact that no one has ever been able to prove that I did steal anything (to be clear – the kisses thing was never prosecuted or anything, I’m not a rapist.)

If your band is looking for representation, send me a myspace link. I am looking for the next big thing so don’t think just because you’re not mega-platinum selling superstars I won’t be interested. Seriously, I’m thinking small. All genres of music considered- I have worked in most. An ex-wife used to joke I’ve had my finger in so many pies it’s amazing I don’t have cinnamon flavoured fingernails. The fucking bitch.

To summarise: Available for work; not on Facebook; not a thief; not a rapist (and have never knowingly been accused of being one); thorough accounting; Email me.