Backstage Pass: Debut

By Abby Howard

When its your job to make noise, you cant afford to mess up.

Pure Fiction have fought for the opportunity to show the world what they can do; now all they have to do is take on the planet. And they plan to win.

Armed with a shiny new set of instruments and a truck load of attitude, they march into the spotlight with their album and every finger crossed. Expectations are high, and the risks are enormous, with disasters looming at every angle; can they make it as the world-conquering rock stars they strive to be?
Four members
Three guitars
Two drumsticks
One rock band
Pure Fiction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493140176

Book preview

Chapter 1

SHAZ

T here was nothing more exciting than the two minutes building up to a rock show. The support act gone and the lights back down. Something was going to happen, and it was only a matter of minutes before it started. Down in the standing area, a shuffling population of sweaty-looking teenagers were buzzing with excitement and nerves as the anticipation of seeing their favourite band began to reach its height. The smell of energy drinks and smuggled-in alcohol were wafting up to the balcony where I was sat, secretly wishing I was down there with them.

I wanted to be down in the crowd, bumping shoulders with the masses that were nearly 10,000 strong and trying to attract the attention of the band members when they heckled with the audience. I wanted to be waving my phone in the air during the slower ballads and screaming along with them during the upbeat songs. I didn’t care that I wouldn’t be acting my age; I wanted to be noisy and uncouth. Sometimes, having a best friend who is pregnant sucked.

Her belly bump was eight months old; it stuck out of her usually slender figure and got in the way when I was trying to squeeze past her. I was happy for her, but when it meant missing out on mosh pits, I started getting bitter.

Mosh pits were a regular haunt for me, and gigs were a recurrent feature in my timetable; they had been for years. They were never going to go away either, not if I had anything to do with it. One day that was going to be me, standing just offstage bursting with nerves, clutching a guitar, and being deafened by the crowds on the other side of the security barrier screaming my name. It sounded superficial, but I wanted it.

‘Not long!’ Dani squeaked loudly, turning to grin with wild excitement next to me and subsequently nudging me with her large belly.

‘What do you think they’ll play first?’ I shouted over the screaming crowds, who’d suddenly screeched at the sight of sound guy who’d strolled out on stage to check a plug. ‘It’s got to be Replay the Swerve,’ I suggested, confident enough in my love and knowledge of the band to be able to predict the set-list.

Dani shook her head and pouted thoughtfully. ‘No, I think that’ll be last, like, encore-type stuff. It’s their biggest hit!’ The screaming died down as the sound guy strolled away, but volume was still required now that similar discussions of equal volume had struck up from the group of parents behind us. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of Celebrity Crush or Coach.’

I lifted one shoulder and nodded sideways. ‘Maybe, you never know. They aren’t the most predictable group of lads, right?’

Dani looked at her pregnant belly. ‘You can say that again.’

I wondered what it was like carrying the baby of a rock star. I mean, it was weird enough being engaged to one.

Damien Adder, drummer of tonight’s band, and I would be tying the metaphorical knot soon, and Dani had a few weeks, if that, before the child of Theodor Baxter, a guitarist with a serious love of all things Fender, and herself came, screaming and crying, into the world. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I raised my eyebrows at the bump and quietly mumbled to myself that I hoped that when the bump became a baby, it did not appear on my wedding day. Babies were freaky enough without poor timing making them even more repulsive.

‘What are the chances of us catching a plectrum up here?’ Our strange, not-quite-friend Zoe tried to joke, leaning across Dani to talk directly to me.

‘Slim,’ I replied with little time for her presence and questions.

We tolerated Zoe because we had to. She was a funny individual who we put up with because connections with the band meant we had too. Josh Carp, the bassist whom she’d produced a child with, was a regular feature in Dani’s and my thoughts of sympathy: putting up with her had to be one life’s greater challenges.

‘I guess,’ she shrugged, apathetic and stupid.

I rolled my eyes and looked back down at the stage. It may have still been in darkness, but there were now familiarly shaped shadows shuffling around in the back of the stage. A large, over six-foot, figure caught my attention. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was Damien. My belly did an excited summersault.

‘There he is!’ Dani giggled, squashing my arm.

I peered into the darkness alongside her, following her line of vision. Sure enough, Theo’s outline could be seen in the far left-hand side of the stage. A guitar-shaped shadow was wandering around on the right side of the stage, seemingly independently. Josh would be attached to it somewhere. His lack of height meant losing him behind large objects quite easy.

‘Not long now!’ I replied, childish excitement making me want to bounce in my seat and scream ridiculously loudly at the stage. I resisted, but that was only because in the line of parents behind us, the future in-law was lurking.

The parental beings behind us were the family of the band members. Damien’s uncle and mother were directly behind me, and, although I wasn’t feeling eyes burning in the back of my head from them, I was certainly getting it from his fourteen-year-old brother. He didn’t like me very much, and I could not explain, for the life of me, why. Dani’s brother was behind us, as was her boyfriend’s mum and Josh’s mother.

The army of parents were here, in London, far away from their homes in Swindon or Sheffield, to celebrate the boys, all four of them, returning back to UK after three weeks away from us and months away from their families. Since the band got signed, we’d all decided to move to London for them to be close to the studio that they were making the album in. Their return to Britain had seemed like a good excuse for their families to come down and see them in musical action.

A guitar string twanged. It belonged to a bass guitar. The sound rang clear through the building, so loud I almost felt it. The scream from the crowd, psyched and fuelled by adrenaline, actually drowned out the tail end of the echo from the guitar. I glanced sideways at Dani, catching her eye just long enough for us both to flail excitedly together. It was happening soon.

‘Here we go,’ Dani whispered loudly, near enough to my head for me to hear her over the yelling teenagers who got a kick out of this sort of environment.

A cymbal crashed. I smiled to myself just because I knew that that was Damien, who by now would be sitting on his throne behind the drums, probably wearing some ridiculous hat or amusing T-shirt. In the last show I saw him play, nearly a month ago now, he had donned a pair of purple spring antennas. They had come back to haunt me on my hen night a week previous to this gig. I wondered what delights Damien’s wardrobe would spew up tonight. He was tall enough for me to just be able to see his shadow in the back light; at six foot four, Damien carried height that dwarfed everybody else I knew. He was tall, optionally bald, black, and took delight in randomly picking me up and carrying me around.

‘I think that might have been for you,’ Zoe shouted over the screaming, leaning across Dani and grinning wildly.

Dani also looked round. ‘How many other girls in the world get to say that and know that it’s true?’ She knew how exciting this was. She’d gone weeks without her man too. ‘We both knew how special tonight was!’

At the back of the stage, a light began rotating, like the black and white circles in old cartoons when people get hypnotised. It bought the centre line of the stage into view. The top of a Fender was caught in the left-hand glint of the beam, Theo hidden in the shadows at the other end of the guitar. The beam bought the fourth member of the band into view. A six-foot silhouette slinking forward in the path of the rotating light behind him, Noel Skelton was a theatrical wizard.

He slunk forwards, sassy in his walk. His hand waved slowly, each finger flexing as it moved. The crowd beneath the stage got sight of him, and the screams that erupted went up so loud that the roof may have shifted off the building. He wasn’t clutching his Gibson guitar; he sauntered forwards unaccompanied. I had to admit, seeing the stage in it pre-show lighting, the band suggestively teasing us with stray chords and drum clashes, gave me a little bit of adrenaline rush.

I could almost hear them chattering at each other through their in-ear monitors. I knew them well enough as my friends to know that as a band, they would be counting down together. Those last few seconds before a show took them from being four guys with an idea to one unit with a talent; a talent that, in this room, in this moment of time, made them as good as Gods.

The lights on stage went up; the guitars screamed in harmony; the drum beat with the ferocity and passion of an army. Like a massive machine, it began.

Four men, one show, one rock band—Pure Fiction!

Chapter 2

DAMIEN

I t didn’t matter that Pure Fiction were not yet world famous. It didn’t even matter that we had not quite managed to sell out tonight; we still played a fucking awesome show. We still always put our absolute everything into making the best rock show that these kids would see from our band. It was still a concert, whether we were ‘world popular’ or not, and there was still a room exploding with teenagers and young adults at the bottom of that stage baying for blood if their new favourite band didn’t deliver.

And deliver we did.

Explosions, timed to synchronise perfectly with the biggest and most important moments of the songs, blew up either side of me. Noise, deafening yet thrilling, poured out of the guitars that were bouncing around in front of me. Screams, so loud I actually worried for the throats of the people producing them, were almost drowning out the sound of Noel’s singing. It was an experience like absolutely nothing I could compare to.

Even though I was fully aware that I wouldn’t see her, I looked up in the direction of the balcony seating anyway, knowing that Shaz was up there somewhere. It had been weeks since I’d seen her because of the tour we had been on, but I knew that I could always rely on Shaz to be there in the crowd whenever she could be. It had actually been weird knowing that she wasn’t out in the crowds during the last three weeks of gigs we’d been playing.

‘Next up!’ Noel shouted, interrupting my thoughts as we finished a version of our soon-to-be-released song ‘Back from Ten,’ written by Theo and Josh on a drunken night in Hull when they had nothing better to do and were attempting to bond. ‘For all y’all beautiful young things out there…’ A scream consisting of mainly females and a scattering of men started up, ‘Celebrity Crush!’

Theo obligingly started up playing that beautiful guitar riff that he had created. It was his only contribution to the making of this song. This was my masterpiece, and, as soppy as may seem, it was written for Shaz. I based it on a song by her favourite band, attempting to ensure that she liked it as much as she liked My Chemical Romance. It didn’t work, and the song sounded like the sort of nonsensical rambling that turned out to be the extent of my rhyming ability. It was truly a Damien Adder song; even the most hard core My Chemical Romance fan wouldn’t be able to find a similarity. In a lot of ways, I actually think that was what swung it for Shaz.

Apparently not all mistakes are bad.

I got introduced to the music of My Chemical Romance by Shaz, who had seen them once live and was possibly one of the biggest fan girls I knew when it came to that band. She and Dani were hilarious when they got going talking about them. They openly admitted that they would leave Theo and me for the lead singer and bassist. Poor Theo, if we ever got famous enough to end up in the same room as them and the chance to meet occurred, he wasn’t going to let Dani anywhere near them for fear she’d scarper.

As I was considering this possibility, Theo leapt up on the drum platform next to me. I wasn’t entirely alarmed by his presence; he regularly appeared up here during this song. I didn’t understand exactly why, but I was always flattered that he felt the need to pay me a visit. Bless, what would he do without his best friend?

‘What are you doing this time?’ I shouted at him over the guitar solo Noel was pouring out.

‘I missed you, diddum’s!’ He laughed, obviously on some sort of adrenaline high right now. He was only ever full of this much energy while we were out on stage.

‘Why? Thank you, chuck!’ I hollered back.

Theo was my closest and certainly my oldest friend, possibly in the world. I’d known him for years. We’d met at school, and we’d been virtually inseparable ever since. He was Pure Fiction’s guitarist. He was fantastic, and he knew it. Since being signed, it had appeared to be a goal of Theo to be able to trump Noel, our equally skilled lead man, on the ability to play a guitar solo that ensured the title of ‘Kick Ass Guitarist.’

‘Check Josh out!’ Theo yelled. ‘I think his monitors are down!’

I found enough time to throw a look across the stage. Theo sprang off, having delivered his message and said hello. He was right, Josh was in the midst of his usual enthusiastic bass playing, but he had an uncomfortable look on his face that told me something was up. I managed to catch his eye and signalled him with an undignified head gesture to get over to the platform when the song finished. Josh was smart enough to both understand and do as he was told.

The song ended on its huge power chord. The crowd gave its expected screams of appreciation for the song. It was always a relief to know that something I had written went down this well. Since we were almost two hours into the show and this was the penultimate song, we took a little bit longer to enjoy the thanks we were getting from the fans in the pit below the stage