Crystal Passion

Chapter Seven

"Detroit!" Jacquie exclaimed as she looked up from the tour itinerary she'd been reading. "That's where our next gig's gonna be. I've

always

wanted to go there."

"Home of the MC5 and Iggy Pop," remarked Judy Dildo.

"And much more importantly," I said. "The home of Techno."

"It'll be good to see Juan Atkins or Derrick May on the decks," said Jane. "I absolutely

love

that

Nude Photo

album."

"You're irrepressible!" giggled Philippa who excitedly gripped Jane's shoulder. She was still glistening with the afterglow of their having slept together the night before and responded rather more to the album's name than the music which the rest of us knew had nothing to do with nudity. Philippa had never been much of a clubber.

"It's a long drive to Detroit," said Bertha who'd be the one taking the wheel of the camper van all the way from Providence. "It's over 700 miles! We'll need an early start."

And a long drive it most definitely was, with most of us squeezed into the camper van, while Crystal rode in the Chevrolet with Jenny, Judy and the Harlot. The route even traversed a stretch of Canada, which for me was only the second country I'd ever visited in the New World, even though it didn't appear appreciably different from the United States.

It was while the camper van drove along the King's Highway in Ontario that Jane, Jacquie and I decided between us that as soon as we arrived in Detroit we'd head to Belleville on the city's outskirts and hunt out the clubs where Detroit's finest might be on the decks. The ground plan determined, our discussion from then on was about which DJ should take precedence: Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins or Derrick May. Jane had read somewhere that Detroit's top club was called the Music Institute while Jacquie was sure that it had closed down. I misunderstood them and thought the sisters were discussing an actual American college of music. Our entire knowledge of Detroit and its Techno scene was based more or less entirely on the small collection of twelve-inch singles we'd amassed back in the late 1980s. None of us had followed the scene with the close attention required to know how much the musical landscape might have changed since then. We'd heard of Carl Craig, Plastikman and, of course, Jeff Mills, but we had no idea where to go or even who were most likely to still be active in the Detroit night clubs. We were adrift in a strange place without a map or compass.

And this we learnt for sure when Jane, Jacquie and I ventured out just after midnight into Detroit's dark unfamiliar streets with me believing that because the sisters were black and because the founding fathers of Techno were also black I was in possession of a mystic charm that would somehow protect me from the horrors lurking in the city's shadows and which would also miraculously guide us towards the world's greatest Techno. We excitedly discussed what treats were in store for us, which in our imagination would be the American equivalent of Hardfloor, Autechre and Carl Cox. Perhaps we'd hear the most cutting edge sound from the likes of Robert Hood, Richard Hawtin or Terence Parker. Surely we wouldn't be disappointed.

It was almost inevitable that rather than us chancing upon the best night club Detroit had to offer, the taxi we'd hailed instead dumped us on a dark forbidding street where we had no clue as to which direction to go. Three girls in a foreign city looking for a good time and we were already wondering whether we oughtn't just hail another taxi and hasten back to our bargain-basement hotel. And we weren't at all prepared for the chill wind that had descended on the State of Michigan from the nearby Great Lakes. It was freezing!

"Fuck this!" said Jane, who wasn't known for her love of wet and cold weather. "If we don't find a club soon, I swear I'm gonna fly off!"

"You and me too!" said Jacquie whose temper was no more reserved. "This is your fucking fault, Pebbles! Where's the bloody Techno? There's fuck all here!"

"Perhaps the decent clubs are hidden away somewhere," I said, while wondering to myself how my instructions to the taxi driver could have led us to a street of boarded-up shops and that unfriendly kind of American bar we were getting to get know all too well: the type that only welcomed a kind of woman who, whatever our clothes might suggest, was very different from the kind of woman we were.

"Where then, Pebbles?" said Jane. "Where? I can't fucking see anything!"

"I'll ask," I said, spotting a pair of dark-skinned young girls in tight skirts tottering by on exaggeratedly high heels. The way they were dressed wouldn't be considered remotely stylish in London, but this was America where good taste in fashion, we'd discovered, was mostly confined to New York.

"Yeah!" I said when I'd returned to the sisters carrying the memory of a garbled message inflected with a thick Hispanic accent. "There's a club round here just two blocks away.

The Cross

it's called..."

"And fucking cross is what I'll be if it's as fucking shit as everything else in this shitty country!" said Jane.

"Honestly, Pebbles," Jacquie chimed in. "This is

all

your fucking fault. I told you we should have looked for some kind of listings magazine. If they've got

Time Out

in London and New York, surely they've got a

Time Out

in Detroit..."

"...Or something like it!" said Jane.

I knew Jane and Jacquie were being unfair, but I was never up to standing up to them when they got irate. Although this didn't happen very often, when it did the twins made up for the respite with sheer unremitting ferocity. I just wished Crystal was there. Even though she hadn't known Jane and Jacquie for as long as me or even quite as intimately, she was far better than me at defusing bad situations and then to somehow steer everyone towards smiling cooperation with grievances both forgotten and forgiven.

"Is

this

it?" asked Jane in mock incredulity when we took our place at the end of a none-too-long line (as they call it in the States) leading into

The

Cross

: a club whose undistinguished entrance was guarded by well-muscled black bouncers in unadorned sleeveless tee-shirts. From inside came a muffled thud of what could have been any kind of music: maybe, we were hoping, something good. The other people in the line were mostly like the two girls I'd got directions from and I was now more pleased than ever that Jane and Jacquie were black. Although I wasn't the only white woman there, those who weren't black or brown were chatting in heavily accented Hispanic English. And although we'd all dressed in anticipation of a hot night out of four-to-the-floor sweaty action in our flimsy dresses, handbags and pumps (and, just in case of trouble, a beret to cover my shaved pate), the majority of women in the line (and there were nearly three times as many as men) were dressed in decidedly down-market chic with perilously unsteady high heels.

"This is gonna be a disaster, I fucking know it!" said Jacquie between clenched teeth. She was so angry she couldn't say another word while we continued to stand in the icy wind waiting to be let in and out of the cold. Jane more than made up for her sister's intemperate silence with a tirade about what a shit-hole America was and how she planned to quit the Crystal Passion band and get back to her studies at Uni as soon as the tour was over or, maybe at this rate, a fuck of a lot sooner than that.

I didn't have much hope that things would be much better when we got inside

The Cross

and I wasn't wrong. The club was the kind we normally avoided at all costs back in England. What wasn't in the shadows was garish, brash and camp. There was even a 70s style disco ball. The poster outside advertised House and Techno and something called Neo Soul hosted by someone with the promising name of DJ Stumble, but I was already far from expecting to enjoy an evening of full-on high intensity Robert Hood and Plastikman.

We spent hardly any more time in

The Cross

than we had waiting to get inside. When the music was unfamiliar to our ears it sounded like high energy Soul or R&B, and the tunes we did know were the kind of commercial House that occasionally creeps into the English Top 40 and gets played on day-time radio. K-Class, Robin S and Rozalla are good in their place but it wasn't what we'd been hoping for. Nothing we heard could really be called Techno. This was not a Night of Dancing to remember for very long at all.

"So much for fucking Detroit!" said Jacquie when we at last got back to the hotel. "A cheap fucking club with plastic music for plastic people! And here we are in a cheap fucking hotel with piss on the stairwell, stains on the carpet and a TV that's tuned to only the worst fucking shit that's ever been broadcast. If this is the fucking capital of Techno, you can fucking keep it!"

"And if you think you can share the same bed as us after this fucking fiasco," said Jane with unnecessary spite, "you've got another thought coming! After all that glitzy mirrored disco ball shit we need as much sleep as we can to get over it."

I hadn't been expecting much intimacy with the sisters after our disappointing night out so I sheepishly curled up in a ball in the single bed while Jane and Jacquie shared the double bed.

Things weren't going very well for us in Detroit at all.

Perhaps we'd all had unrealistic expectations when Marianne told us she'd arranged a tour for the band in America with Sanity Records. There was so much of America we knew about and even idolised. And here we were in the birth place of Techno and, as Jane and Jacquie said, it was all shit. But when Marianne made her announcement, we'd only just finished recording the third album,

Seventy Doctors

, and all of us were enthusiastic and ready for anything.

By then, the Crystal Passion band had expanded from a performing sextet with roadie and sound engineer to an altogether more ambitious and larger ensemble. We were already preparing to record the fourth album. Crystal was brimming over with new songs and compositions. The plan was to get the new album out, record the next one and then head off to the States where we almost truly believed that we'd crack open the world. No longer just the occasional late-night play on Radio One and Capital (not to mention innumerable pirate radios that never paid a penny to the Performing Rights Society). No longer small venues and crappy cellar bars. No longer the small time. We were off to America: the Land of Opportunity and the flashing dollar sign. Surely just over the Atlantic was a future where we could politely decline Grammy awards and enjoy more money than we had sense of how to spend.

Crystal Passion now had four new musicians: Philippa, Olivia, Thelma and the Harlot. And we even had a second roadie, Jenny Alpha, to set up the extra equipment that came with the inflated numbers. The band had continued to grow even though we all wondered how Crystal could stretch from not having enough to remunerate six musicians and two crew, to not having enough for ten musicians and three crew. But I had to agree that the extra accompaniment of Saxophone, Clarinet and Trumpet, various types of percussion instrument and backing vocals had given the Crystal Passion band a richer, more intricate and even rather sophisticated sound. It had come a very long way from one girl and her guitar (and very little else!).

Philippa played other instruments besides the Tenor and Alto Saxophone. In fact, she'd studied at the Royal College of Music and was already a professional musician; but not one who'd made much money despite having played regularly in a classical saxophone quartet and several jazz bands. Like Judy and me, she'd had a kind of epiphany when she saw Crystal Passion on stage, though of all the band she was the one least enamoured of Judy Dildo's guitar-playing and on-stage theatrics. She said it detracted from the music's essential integrity. Ironically, she was also rather more like Judy than she was to anyone else in Crystal Passion in the sense that we could all imagine her having a successful career outside the band. We thought her stint with us was just a way to pass the time before she graduated to a more challenging musical career, but whereas you'd predict that Judy Dildo would be the axe-woman for a metal band, you'd expect Thelma to sign to ECM or Harmonia Mundi; even though from her appearances alone you'd take Philippa for the archetypal Riot Grrrl.

Olivia had been a Civil Servant—working for the Inland Revenue, I think—who used to perform in a Pub Rock band, some fifteen years after Pub Rock's finest days. Her taste was for the kind of Rhythm 'n' Blues that was a light year away from the African-American pop music that's called R&B these days. This Rhythm 'n' Blues emphasised earthiness, earnestness and, of course, rhythm: which last, of course, was where Olivia excelled with her imaginative array of miscellaneous percussive instruments. When Crystal saw her improvise on kitchen utensils, washboard and hollowed-out stereo speakers she was determined that Olivia should join the band which, with her remarkable powers of persuasion, she made sure would happen.

I'd never got to know Thelma or the Harlot as well as I should have done I guess, although I must have had sex with either or both of them at one time or another maybe even at the same time. They didn't know one another before they joined the band, but on stage they were inseparable. They not only provided backing vocals, they also both played brass: the Harlot on trumpet and Thelma on clarinet.

In her account of the Crystal Passion band, Polly Tarantella hardly mentions the Harlot at all and never by her real name which, like mine, is Simone. What were the chances of there being two Simones in one band? I don't know how she got to be called the Harlot, but this dated from long before she joined the Crystal Passion band and the name suited her well. I'm sure it was more her sexual appetite than having a shared musical vision that had compelled her to join the band, however good her trumpet-playing was. The Harlot loved sex—really

loved

it. She was always either in the midst of having sex or in between times of having sex. She was the one who most enjoyed making love with multiple partners and she didn't care at all about which gender. I don't know where she drew the line and I never cared to ask. Was it with transsexuals? With animals? With children? All I know is that we never came across a sexual adventure to which she was loath. Indeed, she was invariably the most enthusiastic. A cock up the anus, two fists up the snatch, two cocks in her mouth and semen dripping down her cheeks and chin: these are my abiding images of her. Those along with the bruises, welts and love-bites that provided evidence of her vigorous and inventive sexual activity.

Thelma was otherwise known as Judy, but you couldn't mistake her for Judy Dildo. Thelma resembled more a little pixie, with very short hair (but not shaved off like mine) and she wore feminine clothes with a kind of Riot Grrrl feel to them. She was a good friend of Jenny Alpha and I think it was probably through our second roadie that Thelma got to know Crystal and then joined the band. Not surprisingly, given the vitriol she visits on Judy Dildo, nowhere does Polly Tarantella ever refer to Thelma by her other name.

Thelma's relationship with Jenny Alpha was probably the most like a conventional two-person relationship of any of us (however much I strived to make this so between Crystal and me). Jenny enjoyed her dope: that was for sure. But she also enjoyed sleeping in the same bed as Thelma and making passionate love with her. It was very romantic. Jenny Alpha was pretty much the physical opposite of our other roadie. Bertha was big, muscly and very much the butch dyke. Jenny Alpha was lithe, toned and had a sweaty kind of femininity that sat well with her penchant for sports gear and trainers. And whereas Bertha always made her presence felt either in bed or in a social setting, you were often not aware that Jenny was even there until, say, she had to pack up the gear or get everything ready for a gig, or, in different circumstances, because you found her fist between the lips of your vulva, her tongue in your mouth and her crotch rubbing against yours.

But it was Jenny Alpha's hand on my shoulder that woke me up after my abortive night of Detroit clubbing. I gazed up through sleep-encrusted eyes at a Jenny wearing only a slip and knickers accompanied by Thelma in just a tee-shirt.

"Plans have changed again," said Jenny without troubling to welcome me to the new day. "We're not gonna be playing at the Detroit Fall after all."

"You what...?" exclaimed Jane who'd also woken up.

"We're gonna be playing at a strip club instead."

"...The fuck!" exclaimed Jacquie.

"It wasn't as if the fucking Detroit fucking Fall was such a great venue to start off with," declared Jane who strode over to my bed, her pendulous bosom swaying and her long fingernails poking into Jenny's lightly raised chest. "I don't fucking know what Marianne was fucking thinking in the first place, but...a strip club! You must be having a laugh. And not in a good way."

I could see that neither Jane nor Jacquie had slept off their anger. This wasn't going to be pleasant.

"So, what's this about?" asked Jacquie when she threw open the door to the bedroom Crystal was sharing with Philippa and the Harlot. "We're booked into a fucking strip joint? What the fuck are we gonna do? Wear fucking tassels on our nipples and swirl them at the fucking punters?"

"I'm not gonna fucking dance on any fucking cunt's lap!" said Jane. "I'd rather shove my fist up his arsehole. And I ain't gonna cut my nails first!"

Crystal was obviously already upset. Her reddened eyes gave the unmistakeable impression that she'd been weeping and if she ever wore makeup it would now be streaked down her cheeks. She bit her lower lip and looked around at her audience of Jane and Jacquie and me, along with Philippa, the Harlot, Jenny Alpha and Thelma.

"I can't pretend it's anything but bad news," she said meekly.

"So, what happened? What's this Jenny and Thelma are saying? Is it true?" I asked, sort of still half-expecting Crystal to laugh and declare that it was all a joke: not that this was ever the sort of prank you'd associate with her.

"While you were out last night I got a telegram from Kai in New York telling me to get in touch with him urgently," said Crystal in a small voice. "So I called him, but it was a while till he picked up the phone. I had to speak to Barnie while waiting: you know, the guy Tomiko got to know... He didn't know much but he knew the gist of it. And that was that the proprietor of the Detroit Fall had got wind of the negative publicity we've been getting and decided he didn't want us in his club, thank you very much! He didn't want a bunch of naked sex-craved punk dykes giving the Detroit Fall a bad name, when what he'd originally been expecting was a folk-rock group. But he didn't want to break the agreement he'd had to give us a gig and, of course, neither did Kai, and, I guess, in America where they call out the lawyers on the smallest excuse neither do we. So, he arranged for a friend of his to stage our show instead and this friend runs a strip club in the city..."

"You're fucking kidding, aren't you?" said Jane angrily.

"Kai backed up what Barnie said," Crystal continued. "I'm going to have to contact the manager of this strip club today. But what Kai also told me is that, given what's been said about us on TV and in the

New York Post

, they want each and every one of us to perform in the nude."