Both Crystal’s and Judy’s parents
preferred that their daughters be buried rather than cremated so the final
moments of the funeral weren’t of two coffins sliding inside a furnace and
being incinerated. Instead a procession of hearses snaked out of the funeral
home and wound through the roads and avenues of Rock Hill to Crystal’s final
resting place at the Forest Hills Cemetery. I was a mess of sorrow and tears during
the whole drive. The brief respite I’d had from my grief by the need to comfort
Marianne abandoned me now that there were others, including Crystal’s father,
who’d taken on the role. It was Andrea who once again shouldered the burden of
comforting her sister as we processed towards the cemetery and the already
excavated rectangles of soil into which Crystal and Judy would be separately
buried.
I knew very
little at the time about the conventions and customs associated with funerals
and wasn’t at all sure what was the right thing to do. I’d seen in movies that
someone or other was supposed to throw something into the open grave, so I tossed
in a linen handkerchief that Crystal had once given me. However, nobody else
followed my gesture and I still regret having lost this small memorandum of
Crystal’s life.
The funeral
wasn’t as private as any of us would have liked. How could it have been? All of
North and South Carolina, or at least those in the Charlotte metropolitan
area, were interested in witnessing the final chapter of the Catawba River
Murder (or the River Park Lynching or the English Rock Star Double Homicide).
And there were those, I’m sure, who believed that Crystal deserved to die for the
sin of being a godless lesbian atheist who shamed the moral rectitude of York
County, SC.
There was a
modest coterie of photographers who followed the funeral procession all the way
from the exit door of the Joseph Armistead & Sons Funeral Home to the
Forest Hills Cemetery. Although they kept a respectful distance, I could still hear
the distant click of camera shutters as I bent my head down in memoriam. However,
not even Polly has suggested that it was the relentless hounding of the press
that had brought about Crystal’s death. It might have worsened the generally
sour atmosphere in the weeks and days that culminated in her tragic murder, but
Crystal had escaped press attention sufficiently enough for her murderers and
Judy’s lynchers to remain unknown, undiscovered and free from the penalty of
justice right up to the present day.
My enduring hope
is that someone somewhere in Rock Hill or the Charlotte metropolitan area,
almost certainly middle-aged and possibly balding, is now feeling sufficient
remorse for his role in the rape and murder of the woman Polly Tarantella deems
the greatest performer of popular music since at least the 1970s that he will
come forward to the Rock Hill PD and hand himself in.
And with the
funeral over, there was no longer a reason to remain a moment longer in South Carolina
or the United States. So at long last (and after far longer than any of us
would have chosen) we could set off for Charlotte Douglas International Airport
and fly back to the United Kingdom.
I don’t believe
a single one of us was sorry to leave America behind.
Not that our
arrival at Heathrow was especially auspicious. Or particularly anything much.
There were no paparazzi or reporters stalking us on our return. In fact, it was
pretty much as we’d hoped. The tensest moment was the wait by the carousel for
our luggage after which we strolled unhindered through the green channel and
then by Piccadilly Line on the long tube ride home.
It wasn’t that our
tragic American tour hadn’t been news. It just wasn’t the sort that would
justify a press stake-out or more than a few column inches in the middle pages
of a family newspaper. Sure there’d been obituaries for Crystal Passion in the
Guardian, the NME, the Wire and Smash Hits, but I got the impression that the tribute
writers got their information directly from our label, Gospel Records. There
was a brief mention of Crystal Passion’s murder on Have I Got News for You in which more effort was expended in
explaining to Ian Hislop what a Riot Grrrl was than on any insight into Crystal
Passion or her music. It was obvious that what interested the British media
wasn’t that a couple of almost unknown musicians had been murdered but that it
took place in South Carolina which, by virtue of being one of the original
Confederate States, was therefore the home of racism, religious bigotry and
mind-blowing ignorance and stupidity. There is nothing that the British—in
particular, the English—like more than to feel superior to a nation of
straw-chewing, cross-burning, negro-lynching hicks.
A few radio
plays of our songs, most particularly by the likes of John Peel and Mark
Radcliffe, piqued interest in our music and this led to an early peak in our CD
sales, which the hurriedly mixed and marketed posthumous fourth album went some
way to satisfy. Although I still think The
Last Word is the least satisfactory of Crystal Passion’s albums, including
her first solo acoustic album, it is the
biggest selling.
“So, who’s
still active in the Crystal Passion Band?” our manager, Madeleine Tartt, asked
when we met her in a small coffee shop near Paddington Station. I was accompanied
by Tomiko and Jacquie while Madeleine had her chunky well-thumbed Filofax ever
close at hand.
“Andrea says
she won’t have anything more to do with the band,” I said. “Without Crystal, my
sister says there’s no point in the band continuing.”
“OK,” said Madeleine.
“Who else is there?”
“Philippa and
Bertha have become an item and they’re travelling the world together,” I said.
“I think they might be in India or Armenia or somewhere.”
“I don’t think
Olivia’s interested in sticking with the band either,” said Jacquie. “Not if
Jane’s still playing…”
“And are you
and Jane still in?” asked Madeleine.
“Only if
Pebbles keeps it together,” said Jacquie, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Jenny Alpha’s
living with Olivia now,” I said. “So, if Olivia’s left, then I guess Jenny has
too. I don’t know where Thelma is, but I don’t think she’d be keen to be
involved in a Crystal Passion band without Crystal. And I’m pretty sure the
same goes for the Harlot.”
“So, let’s do
the sums,” said Madeleine, mostly addressing me. “If we assume that you stay in
the band, and Jane and Jacquie too, then all we’re left with is a trio. What
about you, Tomiko? Do you want to work with Pebbles and the two sisters?”
“I’d do anything to keep the memory of Crystal
Passion alive,” said Tomiko with startling conviction. “It’s what she
deserves.”
“So what we’re
left with is a rhythm section and a sound engineer,” said Madeleine. “Can any
of you sing or play guitar?”
I shook my
head.
If the three of
us were to keep alight the flame of Crystal Passion we’d be more likely to emulate
Underworld or Portishead and pursue a career on the dance floor, while I’m sure
Madeleine would prefer we followed the examples of Joy Division after Ian
Curtis committed suicide or Genesis when Peter Gabriel left (though I don’t
think Jane would relish being the band’s Phil Collins).
“So, what do we
do now?” Madeleine wondered. “There’s an album to be released and I know that
Ben from Gospel records would like some remnant of the Crystal Passion band to
be out there to promote the record and even go on tour. But I don’t think even
Ben would be so enthusiastic if all that appeared on stage was a rhythm section
with no lead singer and no lead guitar or indeed any lead instrument
whatsoever.”
“I don’t see
why not,” sniffed Jacquie. “What about Booker T & the MG’s? What about the
Shadows without Cliff Richard? What about almost every fucking House and Techno
crew you can think of?”
“That’s not
gonna work, Jacquie,” said Madeleine. “The album’s got a singer and a guitarist
on it. In fact, it’s got three singers and two guitars. There’s gonna be some
pretty pissed-off punters if they go to what they think is a Crystal Passion
gig and what they get is the Chemical Brothers.”
“There’s my
friend, Steph,” I said.
“Steph?”
wondered Madeleine. “Who’s she?”
“She can sing
and play guitar.”
“And where is
Steph at the moment, Pebbles?”
“She plays with
the Palms, a sort of alt-folk group, but I don’t think she’s doing anything much
at the moment. In fact, I don’t think the Palms are active at all these days.
It’s hard for them to find gigs, especially in London.”
“She’s untried
and untested, Pebbles,” said Madeleine. “It’d be a heavy burden for her to take
on the role of Crystal Passion. Are you sure she’s up to it?”
“I could ask
her…”
“Well, we don’t
have many options left,” said Madeleine. “I’m getting the very real impression
that if your friend Steph can’t rescue Crystal Passion then the band has
already played its farewell concert.”
I pretty much
agree with Madeleine. The last real gig as Crystal Passion—that is with the
eponymous band leader—was that first engagement at the Penitence Club where
Judy Dildo was the real driving force. What I’d prefer to remember as the final
Crystal Passion gig was the first one at the Sisterhood Women’s Music Festival where
she was accorded so much respect and adulation.
And no way was
Steph a replacement for Crystal. The best that Stephanie Dickens could be was a
surrogate Crystal Passion: able to do the job but never able to match the real
thing.
But Steph was
available and, what’s more, she was thrilled to accept the offer. It was a huge
step forward for her. The Palms weren’t really getting anywhere. They hadn’t
been signed to a record label and I don’t think any of their original songs
were either especially original or even particularly good. But Steph could
definitely sing, even if her voice was more a bluesy mezzo-soprano. She was also
an accomplished guitar player, at least as good as Crystal in a technical
sense. She could also play piano, but as I was already the band’s keyboard
player this wasn’t the role we wanted for her. And she knew all Crystal’s
music, especially the songs on her singer-songwriter debut album. However,
although I’d known Steph since before going to university she was more my
sister’s friend than mine. She and Andrea often practiced playing music
together in their respective bedrooms: Steph on guitar and vocals and Andrea on
the fiddle.
At the time I
thought the music they played was flimsy and dreary with absolutely no beat or
rhythm, but I’d probably rather enjoy it if I heard it now.
Steph did as
well as she could to fill the lead role in the much diminished Crystal Passion
band. In fact, she was probably the most professional and dedicated of any of
us. I don’t think Jane, Jacquie and me really had our heart in the enterprise.
Crystal Passion was dead and every time we played one of her songs (and all the
songs were hers), what we all heard in our heads was Crystal Passion’s voice
and Crystal Passion’s guitar whereas what we were actually hearing was Steph’s
voice and guitar.
And there were
several occasions I collapsed into tears during rehearsals when I recalled how
Crystal used to enthral me with her voice and her enigmatic lyrics and her idiosyncratic
tunes.
The final tour
of an outfit called the Crystal Passion Band wasn’t what I’d call a huge
success even though it attracted larger audiences than we’d ever had when
Crystal was alive. The quartet we now were was not the ten-piece band that
performed on The Last Word. There was
no equivalent to Judy’s electric guitar or the backing vocals from Thelma and
the Harlot. There was none of Olivia’s crazy percussion or Andrea’s ethereal
fiddle or Philippa’s soaring saxophone.
Tomiko did her
best to help fill the vacuum. There is a cliché that the sound engineer is a
proper member of a band, in our case the fifth member, but Tomiko was truly worth
two or three of the rest of the band. She had the imagination and technical
skill of a top club DJ and the ability to squeeze out more sound than could be
expected from a quartet. I was now able to properly appreciate Tomiko’s role when
we were a ten-piece band where she managed to balance the weird mix of
instruments into a pleasing whole and admired her ability to somehow fill the
space of ten instruments with just four.
I loved Steph
for her commitment and energy and, as the tour continued, I came to love her in
a much more physical way. She and I were soon lovers in a kind of distant echo
of the love I’d previously felt for Crystal. Steph was very different, of
course, and not just because she’d never dream of taking her clothes off on
stage (though she had no such reservation in the bedroom). She was tall, she
was slim and her hair was short and enticingly boyish.
Inevitably my
relationship with Steph (which outlasted the Crystal Passion band by several
years) resulted in the band’s final demise. Jane and Jacquie became increasingly
less tolerant of what they came to view as infidelity even when they shared the
same bed as us. And Tomiko didn’t want to be caught between the fury of the two
sisters and me and Steph however much she enjoyed making love with all or any
of us whenever and wherever it might happen.
“I understand,
Pebbles,” Madeleine said, mid-way through the tour when I announced that the
Crystal Passion band would cease to be after the final gig. “Steph’s good. Very
good. Much better than I dared expect. But she ain’t Crystal.”
More’s the
pity, I thought, but I was too loyal to my lover to say anything disrespectful.
“Perhaps you could manage Steph in a different capacity,” I said. “Perhaps as
an artist in her own right.”
“I’ll see,
Pebbles,” said Madeleine, but she was obviously reluctant to do so. It was
Crystal Passion that Madeleine wanted to manage and with Crystal dead, she no
more than anyone else could see the point of the band carrying on any longer.
Steph did find
a manager, but one who better understood the alt-folk scene. She went on to
play as singer and guitarist with many other bands: including the River Bank on
whose records she’s sung duets with John River. But Steph wasn’t a talented
composer and never made much impact as a solo artist. Although we lived
together for nearly a decade, she never understood or appreciated House music
or Drum & Bass or Techno or any of my club-oriented musical obsessions. She
supported me as best she could when I released my own records, but it was
always a mystery to her how I could prefer electronic beats and samples to the beauty
of an acoustic instrument and an unmediated human voice.
I sympathise
with her taste in music more now than I did when we were lovers. In any case, when
we were living together it was a point of pride that we keep our spheres of
musical taste apart. But even now when I hear a piece of music by Bob Dylan or
Nick Drake or Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen I always speculate on how I’d
boost the sound and add a drum beat, rather as the Source did with Candi Staton.
But it wasn’t musical differences that drove Steph and I apart.
It was the love
of another woman and in this case it was Steph’s love for a girl called Sandra.
And it still hurts when I reflect on the fact that Sandra is ten years younger
than me, that she’s sylph-like slim and has a tin ear. For fuck sake, she even
listens to Mumford & Sons! And she watches fucking X Factor and Britain’s Got
Talent. How can Steph have got it so totally wrong?
After this
short-lived postscript of a Crystal Passion Band, there was little more of note
in the band’s story for the next few years. The boost in sales of the Crystal
Passion record catalogue following Crystal’s tragic death soon trickled away. In
fact, in the coming years, record sales shrunk to virtually nothing. The corpse
of her music was occasionally jogged into life by radio plays in America,
Britain and Europe. But while CD and vinyl sales fell off, it was the arrival
of the World Wide Web and the eventual legalization and subsequent growth in
music downloads that brought Crystal Passion’s music to the attention of those
who otherwise would never have heard it and had no prior notion of how it
should be classified.
Polly
Tarantella’s discovery of Crystal Passion and her music didn’t happen out of
the blue. There were others who’d re-discovered her legacy long before Polly
(and hadn’t necessarily paid a penny to download it) and some of them loved the
music so much they created websites to share their appreciation. Soon there
were Twitter accounts to link her new fans who lived in countries as far afield
as Russia, Korea, South Africa and Argentina.
When the
internet was young and the top search engine was AltaVista, all I’d ever found
were bizarrely incoherent references to ‘Crystal Passion’ on embarrassingly
amateurish home-made websites. But Olivia tipped me off that I should have
another look and this time when I entered ‘Crystal Passion’ into the Google
search engine I discovered page after page of links to blogs, forums and online
articles and reviews all celebrating Crystal Passion. Although most entries were
in English, there were other languages that I recognised such as French,
German, Spanish and Italian, but also those written in alphabets I couldn’t
read such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic.
Weirder still for
me to read were the countless references to ‘Pebbles’, a name that had become
more a private nickname than a stage-name in the years since I’d played in the
Crystal Passion band. And somehow this ‘Pebbles’ had become celebrated as the band’s
second most significant member. This might have been a result of my abortive
attempt to keep the Crystal Passion band alive, but mostly from the entirely
accidental fact that almost all the surviving photographs and film of Crystal
Passion featured me in a rather more prominent position than I probably
deserved. It might also have been because I had a memorable stage name that was
still well-known thanks to the endless re-runs of The Flintstones on television channels across the world.
It was probably
no surprise that the growing online interest in Crystal Passion should lead to
XL Records deciding to buy the distribution rights to the otherwise deleted
back catalogue still officially owned by the now defunct Gospel Records. So, overnight,
Crystal Passion became a member of the same staple as Adele, FKA Twigs, Gil
Scott Heron and the Prodigy. As someone who’d been a fan of Hardcore and
Breakbeat in the 1990s, I was pleased that I’d now become a member of the same
label that had released Liquid’s Sweet
Harmony.
Interest in the
music grew to the extent that Pitchfork,
Quietus, NME, MixMag and even Q featured articles on what was forever
described as the ‘unclassifiable’ music of the ‘tragically deceased’ Crystal
Passion. It was on this wave of enthusiasm that Polly Tarantella’s best-selling
biography was published and further increased interest in the band. However, what
was most important about Polly’s championing was her mission to define Crystal
Passion as the most significant music phenomenon since the arrival of Punk and
New Wave in the late 1970s. In essence, her thesis is that popular music needed
a saviour and that saviour is Crystal Passion. And it’s only when you start
thinking about it that you realise how bonkers this contention is.
My own view is
that Polly’s manifesto is compelling to so many people because there’s a widely
held belief that nothing of significance has happened in the world of Rock and
Pop since the 1970s. All you’ve got to do is skim though the popular music
magazines, especially those dedicated to Rock Music, and it seems that everything
of importance was happening in the 60s and 70s. Record sales are still
dominated by the likes of Elton John, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and the Beatles. Nobody
seems to care about the intervening decades. If you browse through magazines
like Classic Rock, Rolling Stone or Q, you’d be convinced that music of any worth simply stopped being recorded
after 1975. So, the assertion that this grand tradition has now been
resurrected from the grave has great popular appeal to a lot of people. And
this is especially so when the contemporary pop you hear on MTV and daytime
television is either astonishingly banal or incredibly derivative.
But I don’t
really agree with Polly at all however much my friends and I have benefitted
from her critical re-appraisal. Crystal definitely didn’t see herself as Rock Music’s
Messiah. In fact, she didn’t have much interest in the mythology of Rock and
Pop at all. No more than me did she believe that popular music is defined only
in relation to the hallowed tradition of the four-piece electric guitar band.
She didn’t see herself as the natural successor of Elvis Presley, John Lennon
or even Joni Mitchell. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy Rock and Pop music. It
was that she believed in a broader, wider, more varied music tradition. She
made no distinction between World, Jazz, Folk or Classical Music. She was more
likely to listen to Steve Reich, Henry Purcell, John Coltrane, Mahalia Jackson
or Tania Maria than anything by Pete Townshend or Bob Geldof (not that she actively
disliked their music).
I don’t buy
into the myth that the history of music is defined by reference to Pop and
Rock. There was a lot of good music around before the Teddy Boys ripped up
cinema seats with their flick-knives after having watched a film of Bill Haley
and the Comets play sanitised arrangements of classic Rhythm & Blues songs.
And anyway, I’d rather go to a club and dance to House, Techno or Bass. And
when I’m at home I’m more likely to listen to Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin or
Flying Lotus than a tedious Rock album with macho guitar and dreary vocals. But
that’s my view. And I don’t accept the view that there’s ever been a major
interruption in service during the time that I’ve been listening to music.
But I can’t
complain too much. I may not subscribe to Polly’s opinions of Crystal Passion’s
significance and I certainly don’t agree with the more extravagant claims of her
greatness as a composer, a musician or a person, but I’m very grateful to the
interest and attention paid to the music and the four albums that were
released.
It particularly
gratifies me to reflect that although Crystal Passion my lover was murdered
more than two decades ago, Crystal Passion the recording artist and composer
has now risen from the dead and is walking amongst us. I just hope that those
who buy her records are actually listening to her music and not just acquiring
them to keep up with fashion and to appear knowledgeable about contemporary
popular music.
But if
Crystal’s music is to be remembered forever then I guess the significance of
her death is that only her corporeal existence has come to an end and that she
has somehow truly attained immortality.