Elegie

By Cailean McBride

Johnny Heretic is dead.

An era-defining rock legend, turned international icon, the entire world apparently mourns his passing. Not least Belinda Cassidy, fading music journo and Johnny's former childhood friend.

But as she delves into her memories and into the history of Johnny's chequered career, is she in danger of finding somet

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calenture Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780957501874

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© Cailean McBride 2023

The right of Cailean McBride to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published in Great Britain by the Calenture Press in 2023.

ISBN: 978-0-9575018-7-4

Printed and bound in the UK

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Cover design by Calenture Press (Design)

elegie

By Cailean McBride

I. don’t let our youth go to waste

one

SHE SHOULD have been elsewhere when the news of

Johnny’s death broke. It never failed to irk her, to ignite a just-dormant spark of anger and self-reproach, striking her as unjust on all sorts of levels. Given their shared past, and respective careers, it ought to have been a Moment, and one in which she had been an active and central participant. Not necessarily some kind of mawkish deathbed scene, which, let’s face it, would have been neither of their styles, but something — anything — that would have finally made some sense out of their whole fractured, discordant history. But instead Belinda was left bereft in ways other than the obvious, as if robbed of, if not a prize, then a parting gift.

They’d all been trooping out of a dismal upstairs meeting room where a good dozen of them had just been subjected to The Talk. All the usual bullshit. Difficult trading conditions. The challenges of digital. Profound regret. Opening a period of consultation before doing what they’d already decided to do. Earnest faces all round, tempered only with a slight suggestion of relief that they themselves had been spared the chopping block this time around. A sheepish shuffling of papers and then back to the newsroom, all faced with the prospect of imminent financial Armageddon but, being journalists, also babbling animatedly, on some level getting off on the drama, even if it was one that spelt potential personal ruin.

And there was Johnny. On all the TVs right down the newsroom, each screen tuned to a different news feed, showing him in a different phase of a long and schizophrenic career. Muddy footage from the 70s, so familiar that it felt almost like a purloined memory — Johnny with his crow-black hair, that youthful, stupidly pretty face dusted corpse white, but angular, sculpted, almost alien in its beautiful weirdness as he prowled under primitive stage lights, his naked charisma offsetting the naive tackiness of the age. And then the move into the 1980s, the glam excesses replaced by designer pastels, greased ponytails, the first facelift. Looking uncomfortable, unreal even, in the middle of slick, overlit corporate stadia. Followed by the pared-down 90s version. Still skinny as hell, the hair reverted to its natural brown, but also streaked with grey. A darling of the indie set, the austere, black clothes suggesting a penitent rather than the strutting, cocky figure of the earlier years, something melancholic about the slight scowl on the serious, but now gaunt and lined face.

But after the initial pang of warm nostalgia, she was immediately left asking ‘why’. Why show this now? The obvious answer came with an inevitable prickle of fear. You get to a certain age and death starts to lurk behind every phone call, every name summoned from the past. And very occasionally, if you moved in the kind of circles she once had, it could mug you right out of the TV and that was surely what was happening now. Because despite a late-career resurgence of sorts, Johnny just wasn’t enough of a deal any longer to merit this kind of prime-time sturm und drang for any other reason. A sex scandal was always a possibility, especially these days, but it struck her as unlikely, not least because Johnny had been down that particular road before. No, he’d have to have screwed a royal baby over the dinner table of Buck House to get this kind of wall-to-wall these days. Curiosity and just hint of panic burned in her as she hurried back to her desk to check the wires.

Yes, there it was. Just a snap so far.

Johnny Kennedy, singer with 1970s rockers Heretic, has died at the age of 62. MFL.

So, she’d just missed it. Which in itself was typical of the kind of luck she was having of late. She waited for further snaps, maybe even the start of a nightlead, but nothing was forthcoming, so she turned instead to Twitter. And, sure enough, there was plenty there. For the first time in years, and possibly ever, Johnny was trending.

Just heard the news. Can’t believe it. RIP Johnny — @hereticfan77

Rest in peace jony so gutted — @glammgurll

Sad to hear of the passing of my old friend, John Kennedy. He’ll be missed — @therealmacateer

Jonny Heretic sucked. Glad hes ded — @iluvphilcollins

She was still wading through this drivel when Si approached the desk, propping himself on its corner and looming over her, giving pointed glances from her to the screen and back.

‘You alright?’ Si’s take on sincerity, no doubt learned on some braindead management course, always came across as the least genuine thing she could imagine. Of course, the idea that you were expected to act like some kind of human being in a newsroom was a relatively new and, to Bel’s mind, not necessarily welcome one. She still had a sneaking nostalgia for the unvarnished honesty of the old days, if only for the fact that it was a place in which Si would not have survived. His blinking, plastic face, ostensibly unreadable, was in fact giving her, and not for the first time, all the information she needed about just what a shit journo he must have been before his no-doubt-wise slither into management.

‘Yeah, of course,’ she said. ‘Just a bit of a shock, that’s all.’

‘I was talking about, you know,’ he nodded in the vague direction of the room where she and half a dozen colleagues had just learned that their futures on the paper, and probably the industry itself, were about to come to a rapid end. Not that, if she were honest, she particularly cared at this point. She’d been aware for some time that she was fucked, financially speaking. She’d have been OK — more than OK — if she’d had the sense to keep her feet under the table all those years back. At various points in The Sentinel’s history, she’d been the chief reporter, the news editor and the arts editor, and if she hadn’t broken that run by failed attempts to break into magazines and later broadcasting (never progressing beyond a couple of early-morning press round-ups and a few sporadic slots on Woman’s Hour) then she would have been looking at a relatively decent payout right now — or at the very least would have accrued a pension pot so prohibitive that keeping her on, if even to just dust the unused filing cabinets, would have still have remained the company’s most prudent option. As it was, she was hurtling towards retirement with a serious lack of pension and not that much in the way of savings, so arriving there a few years ahead of schedule wasn’t going to make all that difference.

Bel shrugged. ‘Not exactly a surprise, is it?’ There’d been at least three rounds of panicked editorial cuts so far and these days no one was under any illusion what the summons to some dreary meeting room meant for them. She’d done well to escape the axe until then, although maybe it had just taken them that long to hack through the really dead wood and for her to fall into that category herself.

But Si’s attention had already drifted back to her screen. Redundancy chat always made him a bit nervous, possibly through a sense of culpability — he had, after all, been the one delivering the gloomy tidings this time around — but more likely because he considered it to be a new strain of virulent journalistic disease, and one which he was terrified of contracting. Bel was surprised that he hadn’t approached her with a handkerchief over his mouth and spraying Dettol in his path.

He nodded towards the still frenetically scrolling Twitter feed on her screen. ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I did.’ She didn’t bother to keep the note of pride out her voice, although who really cared about rock stars these days? Yesterday’s men. Not that they were the only ones. ‘Used to anyway.’

‘Fancy writing a piece then? Thousand words on the man, the myth, the legend, that kind of thing?’

‘Sure. I’m probably the only person in here qualified to do it anyway.’

If Si had detected any kind of barb in that, he didn’t show it. ‘And if you could knock out a quick bit for the web too, that would be brilliant. Just a line will do. We’re already looking slow on this.’

And then he was off again.

‘That would be bwilliant,’ Bel muttered once he was safely out of earshot — there was, after all, no point in jeopardising whatever meagre payout she would be getting — and started a new file.

Rock legend Johnny Kennedy dies at 62

BY BELINDA CASSIDY

THE world reacted with shock yesterday as it was announced that rock legend John Kennedy had passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 62.

Kennedy was best known for the band Heretical Prophecies, part of the so-called glam-prog movement of the early 1970s. Heretic, as they were better known, were famed at the time for their intricate and highly theatrical stage shows, that could sometimes last for up to six hours. Together with musical collaborator Stuart ‘Mac’ Macateer and fellow musicians Vince Brogan and Ally Paterson, Kennedy successfully bridged the elusive gap between artistic and commercial success that made his onstage alter ego Johnny Heretic a household name…

(from http://www.thesentinel.co.uk/culture/johnny-heretic-dead-at-62.com)

As the day progressed, apparently hellbent on outright shittiness, it became clear to Bel that there would need to be some kind of personal tribute to Johnny and so she bought a bottle of vodka on the way home. Decent stuff too, not the gutrot they had used to drink back in the day, although she seemed to remember considering it quite exotic at the time — no doubt something to do with expressing solidarity with their revolutionary brothers behind the Iron Curtain, and long before it had become the spirit du jour of teenyboppers and other demographics not known for being able to hold their drink, a fraternity she recalled Johnny joining himself when he cleaned up his act sometime in the late 1980s.

But first things first. Before she got too incapable, she climbed into the loft, wading through the detritus of several failed relationships and a variable career to find her Heretic files. A tattered old OMO box that she’d been dragging around for years without ever really bothering to look inside — the main thing being that she knew she had it. She dragged it back downstairs, with only a slight struggle, before cracking open the voddy, sparking up a Marlboro and getting down to the serious business of Remembering Johnny.

Things got messy surprisingly quickly. On the Tube home, she’d had grand notions of lit candles and a curated, meaningful playlist but several people online had already beaten her to it and so she chose one that contained most of her favourites and let it stream through her phone while she delved into the box and their shared past.

It was an appropriately mixed collection. A lot of crap, of course, but some real treasures too. A few old 45s, even a couple of old eight-tracks and flexidiscs, but for the most part it was paper, clippings of some kind or another, and even a few musty magazines, preserved in their entirety. As she laid the cuttings out around her (good thing she hadn’t bothered with the candles), a strange kind of synchronicity seemed to develop. The amateurish line drawings and DIY Letraset typography of the earliest gigs in arts centres and the upstairs rooms of long-gone pubs gave way to slightly more slick posters and breathless ‘local boys made good’ cuttings from the hometown press, which then evolved into the more cynical paragraph reviews in the music papers before these in turn became mainstream tabloid page leads that focused more on tales of sex and drugs excess, finally petering out in screaming headlines of a darker hue, of the death of Lisa Laverty, and of Sam Chamberlain, and all the rest of that particular circus. Things got sparse after that, perhaps as Heretic became tainted with the bad news, or perhaps because they’d overvaulted it, moving into a higher, more untouchable, realm of stardom. But the box was as much her history as it was Joke’s. She kept catching her old bylines, juvenile turns of phrase, breathless enthusiasm calcifying into sardonic smart-arsery. It was not unlike looking through old photographs, seeing her fresh-faced passion (or was that naivete?) transform into something a little more guarded, maybe even what you’d call jaded. But the same went for Johnny. Wide-eyed teenage hope becoming submerged, but not wholly extinguished, under the arch camp of Heretic’s glam theatricality, retaining something of the innocence of a kid playing with their mum’s make-up box, before emerging sleeker, more professional, if a little colder and a lot less likeable. But as Lizard Jim once said, no one here gets out alive.

But it struck Bel as she gazed at the yellowing curls of newsprint that for someone whose image had once been so ubiquitous, so public, and even perhaps for a time shorthand for the hokey excesses of a particular era of rock-and-roll history, that her deepest memories of Johnny were of something far more intimate, depressing even. Her and Johnny and Mac in a freezing Glasgow playground as November cold whistled through holey tights and hand-me-down raincoats, everyone around them dancing and chattering and grabbing a last few moments of freedom before being scooped into the oppressive mystification of maths, French verbs, geography and sewing, all enforced with clenched, guttural impatience and rulers across knuckles. The three of them, bonded in snot-nosed misery, and an unquenchable desire to be anywhere but there.

And there it should have stayed, an ‘I was in school with…’ anecdote if it hadn’t been for a grey October’s day in 1973 when she filed into a press briefing with the rest of her fellow hacks, coasting in on a fug of cigarette smoke and desultory — mostly male — chatter. The conference was a big enough deal that the familiar faces from the trades, identifiable by trendier gear, longer hair and the faint but perceptible tang of cannabis and patchouli, were interspersed with the older, whisky-reddened faces of Fleet Street pros, mostly from the redtops, no doubt hoping to sniff out a bit of prurient scandal. No one was talking to her, needless to say, not even the ones she knew, but whether that was through some blokey solidarity against chicks in the workplace or if they just considered it too early in the day to be hitting on her, she couldn’t tell. They took their seats in the underheated, draughty conference room and waited, poised with tape recorders or old-school spiral pads and biros, for the main event.

They didn’t have to wait long. The hubbub died down as a door opened at the far end of the room and several figures sauntered out, taking their place behind a row of tables laid out with mics, water jugs and an incongruous vase of unseasonal, and probably plastic, daffodils that Bel just knew was already pissing off the togs squatting at the front of the hall, squeezing out noxious farts as they fiddled with their lenses and flashguns.

And there they were. The boys from Heretical Prophecies, otherwise known more simply as Heretic, almost certainly the biggest band in the UK at the moment. Not ‘bigger than the Beatles’ as some hyperbolic hack on one of the tabs had tried to claim but perhaps starting to approach the outer fringes of that neighbourhood. Bel felt a little surge of pride at her connection to the men on the stage, one that was probably stronger than that of any of the other reporters assembled there and the reason why she’d been able to prise this gig out of grimy and less-deserving, but nonetheless male, hands. They went way back, had even been what you might call inseparable for a time. Or at least until real life started kicking in. Paths diverging. Bel got sucked into working for a living while the boys tried their luck at this rock-and-roll thing, all of them finding varying degrees of success. She felt Mac’s eyes strafe the crowd, the old boyishness now tinged with a flinty hardness, his gaze failing to alight on her, or offer any flicker of recognition if it had.

This didn’t disappoint her as much as maybe it should. Because it was really Johnny she was here to see, same as everyone else. He was the star, the centre, the incandescent heart of the band, to the point that in the popular imagination he had ceased to be known as plain old Johnny Kennedy and was now ‘Johnny Heretic’, a sexually amorphous alien ambassador, intent on stealing all the world’s children away. Something between the Childcatcher and Peter Pan, you might say. It was, she knew, something that must drive Mac bananas but she understood why this elevation had happened. Joke (her old nickname for him derived from the first letters of his first and last names on their school register) had grown from the awkward, even effeminate, boy of the kind who perhaps needed that bit more protecting than others, especially in the Glasgow of their childhoods, to finally become something more strikingly unique, otherworldly even. Something that contrasted wildly with Mac’s blokey relatability. Mac was the Yin to Joke’s Yang, easy-going where Joke was diffident, smiley where Joke was morose, a player where Joke was a maverick. It was the perfect dynamic for the band’s image, one that could be simplified and cartooned for the press. Mac was the one the girls could bring home to mother, Joke the one they could masturbate to in their rooms. And there was no denying that Johnny had become something simply beautiful. The raven hair silken and falling on each side of an angular, ridiculously cheek-boned face, the baby-blues to die for, although currently hidden behind a pair of aviators that suggested a bad hangover. And as he leaned towards his mic, the whole room leaned in too, hungry for copy.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ The voice was huskier than it usually appeared on record. More grounded, banally human even. And definitely hungover, Bel decided.

The press conference itself was pretty weak fare. Some chat about the single that was lodged in the upper reaches of the chart, some tidbits about a new album, a promise of tour dates. Bel could sense the agenda beyond all that, something they weren’t telling, or not yet at any rate. This was just to churn out a few more headlines, keep their names out there, maybe buoy up sales of the single and the last album for a week or two longer. Fine, if that’s what they wanted. But then they were allowed to butt in with what really interested them — the girls, the drugs, the parties, all deflected with wry chuckles and practised ease. Bel had her hand up for most of it but she had a crappy position, right in the middle of the seating and easily obscured by the sea of male hands, her voice drowned out by the barking machismo all around her.

And then it was over and the figures behind the table were standing up, being gently ushered back into seclusion by their various assistants. Bel felt suddenly irritated. She’d be damned if she would give up that easily. The press pack filed out, the rumble of chatter and the cagy comparing of notes already rising again and she was in danger of being carried along with them. She hurriedly pulled the blue cap of her biro and launched it to the front of the room, managing to bounce it off the top of Joke’s departing head. He turned curiously and then, gratifyingly, grinned as he caught sight of who had pitched it. Bel returned the grin and gave him a thumbs-up, extending her pinky to make the gesture of ‘call me’ just before he was guided through the door, his eyebrows still raised in surprise, a half-smile on his face.

This encouraged her and she pushed against the wave of departing hacks, ignoring their grumbling, to get to the front of the room, only to find her progress ultimately blocked by a cadaverous figure in a hideously shiny, silver sharkskin suit that was at least a decade out of fashion but whose owner was clearly sticking with it out of misplaced loyalty or, more likely, plain stubbornness.

‘Sorry, love,’ said a gravelly voice that sounded as if it would have been more at home behind a fruit barrow or selling knock-off radios from a car boot than minding a major rock act, ‘that’s yer lot.’

‘Come on, Roach,’ she said, looking the lanky, middle-aged dude in the eye. ‘It’s me. Belinda. Remember?’

Roach, aka Magnus Roche, had been Heretic’s manager since in the old days and there had been more than a few times when she had been flung into uncomfortably close proximity with the oily fucker. But she was now hoping that those ancient, and questionable, experiences might somehow stand her in good stead, get her through that door.

‘Oh yes, hello, Miss Belinda.’ He rearranged his wrinkled-apple face into some semblance of a smile, although not one without a hint of mockery to it. ‘I’d heard that you’d joined the Fourth Estate.’

‘For my sins, Roach, for my sins. So, how about it? What’s the chances of a quick five minutes with the boys?’

‘Who is it you’re with again?’ Bel caught Roach’s gaze slithering downwards and