• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 184 0

stalkers. Rubbish dippers and underwear thieves, letters describing wedding plans in intricate detail, outfits for pageboys, piping on the cake. I saw the same woman in America at every gig, not dancing, not singing along, just staring without moving, hovering around like a fucking ghost. She looked like your average Midwest mom, big boned, big hair, heavy makeup. I could imagine her picking up the kids from school, baking a tray of cookies with an apron on. But no, she was at the hotels, outside the dressing room doors, on the sidewalk as the tour bus pulled away. She was scaring me. Ricky said he’d ‘arrange something’ if it started affecting the performance. Shit, what a thing to live with if he did.

GJ – So, what happened?

BK – I invited her into the hotel and had sex with her.

GJ – What? Are you fucking joking?

BK – True. And that was it. All over. I never saw her again.

The myth of me vanished. Whatever she was imagining, she realised I wasn’t it.

GJ – She could’ve been a real nut.

BK – She probably went back to baking cookies, appreciated normality again. I tell you, that was a liberating moment. Never thought I’d be so happy to disappoint. That was where the Moscow stunt came from.

GJ – The Red Square Rocks double? I knew that wasn’t you … I know that ass a mile away.

BK – Ouch! You were the only one.

GJ – He did look like you … but …

BK – The moves were wooden.

GJ – You need a clone, trained to jive from birth.

BK – Wise hired him when the public lost the plot. Mathew. Mathew Quail. Some kid who dropped out of university to be Billy 2. What a fucking job. They were tipping the fucking tour bus on the way out of stadiums. Teenage girls crushed against the barriers. I felt like a TV evangelist, fans fainting as I reached out and touched them. Bellboys and chambermaids selling bogus room numbers for fistfuls of cash. Mathew would wave from dressing- room windows while Ronnie or Tommy screeched us out a side street in a hire car. I’d peek out from under the blanket and see fans shinning up drainpipes and rushing the security.

GJ – Sounds like fun.

BK – It was a getaway. We were shit scared. We were swerving between gangs of kids wearing T-shirts with our faces printed on them. This was an escape from fame, but not Billy K. Good friends or not, the guys in the car knew. To them Billy K was hiding on the back seat. Barry was nowhere. I needed the full out-of-Billy experience. Mathew already knew the songs, I just had to fine-tune some of his microphone waltzing and who’d know we’d switched? Not the fucking band, Ronnie caning his kit and Tommy and Dave too frit of fucking up … So I slip offstage mid-song, everyone thinking the usual theatrics, except Billy 2. He’s all ready to come bouncing on, same outfit, shirt undone four buttons, doused in water to imitate the sweat and effort of keeping a quarter million Muscovites from freezing over.

GJ – And no one guessed …

BK – Not for two songs. I grab a coat and hat, hurdle the barrier and suddenly I’m in the thick of the crowd, watching myself sing and dance. I was squashed, crushed, spat on and offered swigs of vodka from plastic bottles. The Kremlin floated in the haze like some alien cathedral. It was a fucking wild crowd. Two women had a fistfight. A bottle came boomeranging past my ear and shattered on the back of a hatless head. The man brushed off the glass and punched his fist into the sky. Crowd surfers climbed over us, crawling towards the stage. All this hysteria, all for Billy K. Not Barry Fulton, not me.

GJ – He forgot the words.

BK – Everyone forgets the words. He missed a whole verse. Tommy thinks I’m drunk or stoned, dances his way across the stage and actually manages to look up from the strings …

GJ – Then what?

BK – He freaks out. That’s it. The song sounds like something dropped down the stairs. The crowd boo and cheer simultaneously. King of the fucking castle Wise strides onstage. He susses the double and hauls him off by the collar. Bearing in mind