Hiljaiset Levyt: PUNKNET 77 - Barracudas
THEY SHOOT REINDEER, DON'T THEY?
by JEREMY GLUCK
BollnasBollnas is beautiful by night. Which is fortunate, because for most of the year it's dark. Four hundred miles due south of the Arctic Circle, anchored in tundra scraped and stunted by long-departed glaciers and strafed by cosmic hail, it's not my kind of town, and I get the impression the lifeless locals feel likewise. Ah, Bollnas, where the night-life consists of the night. And one chip stand. That's closed weekends.
But in Bollnas, a populated blot on the terminally tree-line landscape of northern Sweden, we begin. Having survived unceremonious ejection from EMI the previous spring of 1981, said label having wisely opted to invest what they might have spent toilet-training our misbegotten novelty potential in Duran Duran, we founder Barracudas - that's me, the singer, and guitarist Robin Wills - had fired our original rhythm section, replaced it with a very tall bassist and shorter, more obnoxious drummer, added genuine cult legend Chris Wilson, late of Frisco's Flamin' Groovies, and accepted a booking from an unreconstructed four-eyed Swedish mod named John. Obsessed with our debut album, Drop Out, the poor schmuck just couldn't resist baiting us forth to his forlorn hometown. Bollnas. Unbeacon of the North.
We is there. Having broken our collective cherry in Stockholm a few nights before, played some other anonymous dusky burgh and driven like a thousand klicks in John's rented rolling stockette, we hit Bollnas with a merry skid. The gig there was ace, an outdoor affair when I discovered to my great exhilaration that by following self-evident cues I could recreate Jagger at Altamont to the point where, upon touring the front row, I was mobbed and nearly dismembered by psychotic Squareheads. I lost a few pounds, a pair of white Levi's and shreds of my sanity but John's girlfriend, who I was stealing at my leisure, liked it and although her general deportment recalled that of a diseased eggplant I felt justified in using my impressive performance to lay the dame (which I never did but I thought I knew her from a previous incarnation which, in hindsight, was probably a lot safer: I subsequently wrote a song about it all and it went Top 20 in Ireland, thereby rendering my one credible chart entry a sort of living joke).
Anywho, we departed Bollnas two days later, worse for wear after partially blinding ourselves on bathtub gin. The plan was, as ever, simple, and as ever with The Barracudas stood as much chance of succeeding as suckling pig at a bar mitzvah. We would, we believed, catch the night train to Goteborg, and from there be ferried in luxury back to Blighty. In my pocket, in my name, I held for the band a cheque for round £300, which to us in those days, living off dick-a-week apiece, was analogous with Solomon's treasure. We'd each have more money than we'd made in months: approximately £60. Not much to you, but a motherfuckin' nugget of grade A Morroccan to each of us...
I digress (which I do a lot and is no doubt the direct result of all the demon hash I smoked in those far-off days). Everything was on schedule as we embarked the Bollnas-Goteborg night train, a lengthy, rustic tube of matte-green metal, and took our seats in a tiny compartment with an inane, archetypal nerd Nordic. With us travelled the comely Sissy, an American-educated, inordinately stacked brunette with the right stuffing for a Russ Meyer flick and basting left to spare. Chris had taken a basic interest in Siss and we were gonna let him examine her aboard the express before dropping her, no doubt with a prominent, flushed bounce, somewhere between Bollnas and civilisation. As a hitch-hiker, she had awesome prospects.
Fine. We're in the compartment. The Nerdic (a not-so-great Dane) is trying to break the ice, which backstage might have been diverting but which at midnight on the Dis-Orient Express is as good for your head as Burroughs on a bad hangover. You wanted to take his sad mouth and stick it somewhere the sun don't shine. Like Bollnas. Cripes, as soon as we got on the train, that prescient dread all smalltime cult bands know to their utter cost had already permeated our drifting collective consciousness: something bad was about to happen, and no one knew what it was. Didn't want to. The early warning came, per usual, courtesy of Chris. The drugs it took me ten years to do he had done in about ten days and at times it showed. He was getting ancy when he noticed that, inexplicably and quite cruelly, the cars were locked at each end, leaving
the passengers bottled horse flies all night, with only a pitcher of stale tap water perched on a quaint stand to pass for refreshment, to be shared needless to say with the lagubrious Dane - whom Chris was eager to throttle with every additional word of heavily-accented grade school Englitch - and any other certifiable, sociopathic, cabin-fevered perma-frosted fuck-ups on board. Even Sissy, whose profile could have distracted the faithful at Nuremburg, was failing to divert her beau, and when a 40DD babe can't get through you know things are gonna deep-six very shortly indeed...
It was maybe two hours later that we noticed that, having disappeared following targeted threats to yon doltish Dane, Chris had been gone some time. So what, right? We have all night...to get him out of the goddamned water closet, because where else would he be hiding? An acid flashback, see, to days in the joint (a few, he never did big time), call it textbook claustrophobia, and we were due to catch that ferry soon. In relays we surrounded the john, commiserating with our distressed guitarist, imploring him to leave the confines of his urine-scented cell...I think our manager Tony actually joined him briefly but how long could you stand cooped up in the can with a fruitcake?
New plan! Tony will chaperone Chris off the train when Sissy debarks God-knows-where, chill the fucker out and rejoin us in good time to nab the ferry. So the train stops and in darkness and pledged not to let him drink heavily Tony and Sissy escort Chris off the train, leaving the rest of us to get some shut-eye.
Dawn broke like a rotten egg. We pulled into Goteborg and trundled in some disarray to the ferry terminal, due for a nine AM departure. We waited. We hoped. Some may even have prayed. We all cursed. By eight forty-five it was apparent that Tony and Chris were unlikely to make that big white baby. Leading to one awful conclusion: one or more of us were going to have to remain behind and mop up. My mind's eye cued the cheque: in my name. I volunteered.
At precisely one minute past departure of the ferry carrying my colleagues, I saw Tony dragging Chris into the terminal building and up the down escalator to the booking hall as, Stoically, I waved a fond farewell to those too lucky to be detained. Chris had been drinking heavily: apricot brandy and he couldn't walk. Tony couldn't walk: he had been dragging Chris. I couldn't care less. All we had to do was get the next ferry. Which, as we discovered, left the very next night for...Esjberg. Of course, once in lovely Esjberg (on the western coast of Denmark, incidentally, where the Baltic Sea blows gales that evoke the winds of deep space) we could, the very next night get another ferry elsewhere, maybe Belgium or Holland, and then another ferry home. Or, if we preferred, wait a week for a direct passage. Or hang ourselves. Or not, which amounted to the same idiot thing.
Over a picnic lunch upon terminal lawns, in glorious April sunshine we duly opted soft. The Dane had been a homely omen: it had to be Esjberg. We ate, we post-rationalised, and at noon we went and found a cheap flophouse and forgot the ensuing hours of squalid ennui.
The trip to Esjberg itself was quite tolerable. After all, we had money (as soon as I cashed the cheque) and no one would blame us now for blowing it. Esjberg itself, however, was grotesque in the extreme, the sort of north European prole-hole depicted by Kafka in The Castle. But we handled it and booked into a dark, dank and sinister dump owned and operated by a man whose every move bespoke mundane perversion. We crowded into a double, discussed our misgivings, and agreed there was only one solution: score some dope. Come dusk, with our remaining cash we headed for a nearby watering hole. Inside, we were not at home. Surrounded by factory fodder with faces hewn from some malignant ironic ore, stratified with nihilism and veined with hard liquor and harder drugs, we somehow managed to obtain a quarter of jet-black biker hash and make a sorry getaway. I vividly recall beseeching the gods late into the night, terribly awake on my cot bed in the corner, hallucinating as the sage words of another cult wailer, Wild Man Fischer, came back to me: "Don't be a singer."
The next morning I ambled downtown to cash the cheque. What confused me was that, standing in the middle of the main drag, not a soul was on the streets at 10AM. I walked up and down. I looked in windows and tried doors. Nothing. Then it hit me: it is a fucking Danish bank holiday! Of course, the one day in my life that I absolutely must have access to A Danish Bank, why wouldn't it be? Shortly thereafter, a greasy gleam in his fish eye, the hotel owner gladly offered me an exortionate rate of exchange and lifted my three hundred clams. We had money, finally. Now we just had to get home. The next ferry.
In fact, we did get that ferry, and the next one. We did blow all the money and didn't give a fuck and were forgiven. And when we got to Dover we actually got down on our everlovin' knees and kissed the tarmac of the Realm and thanked God that Esjberg was very far away. And, even better, when we got back to north London I did have secreted in a box the precious hashish necessary to roll one extraordinarily thick and lethal joint which, the three of us having ingested, made us head immediately for the local cafe and each order a huge Sunday lunch. Gorged, in good spirits, largely out of touch with reality, we returned to my room. The sun blazed down outside. My ex-girlfriend Lorraine, with whom I was still desperately in love, called and told me she missed me (she wanted a child, never realising like so many young women that, in a musician, she had one). Esjberg had no more significance to me now than world affairs and/or the lives of the saints. Everything was exactly as I had left it: I was broke, deluded and wrecked. If I had two brains one would be lost and the other would be looking for it. But I had neither forgotten nor forsaken the first Secret of Cult Rockn'Roll Stupidity, stated most concisely and crudely by perhaps the greatest yeller ever to con his way into a corporate boardroom buffet, The Dictators' Handsome Dick Manitoba: Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
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Created by JJu: January 13, 1997 Ever been in Sweden? Why?
Last Updated: January 13, 1997