Sin Delicious

Chapter Three-1

Chapter Three

Love Song

As I sit upon the bus driving through another anonymous night-time, studying the frame I captured only a couple of hours ago, I witness more evidence of what is fast becoming an incontrovertible truth: that this road-trip adventure of debauched promiscuity might unexpectedly be turning into a tale of love. Sure, one has to peer close through the haze of hormones and drugs and frivolous lust to see it. It wasn’t immediately obvious but the camera helped me focus. Suddenly there it was in the way she looked at him when she thought no one was watching. It was there in his eyes when they were together but apart, in the way her breath caught when he walked into the room.

I thought they were just two hotties who naturally wanted to jump each other’s bones, but now it seems their feelings have reared up and got all serious. Once you notice, you see it in every little thing between them. The frisson is there for sure. You have to blot out all the lewdness, the noise and the craziness that surrounds this way of life, but in the middle is them, growing closer, more vital to each other by the day. Suddenly the attraction has gone way beyond lust. It is a shame then that he is married to someone else. That someone is right there in the photo I’m looking at, clinging to her famous rock star husband for dear life. But the picture has captured his very thoughts, and they are not of her.

I might have considered the thing between Sindee and this man to be little more than playground lust, since Thunderhed only joined up with the Coliseum All Stars/Death in Venus tour a fortnight ago and this shouldn’t have been long enough for any hearts to be lost – especially with the little contact there has been between the two of them and the fact that Mrs Thunderhed was so often on the scene. However, just a couple of days ago I became privy to information that told of a longer history between the two – one Sindee herself is still unaware of. I got these truths from the horse’s mouth, from Thunderhed’s manager, no less. He spilled these spicy beans when I was stuck in a hotel lift with him after Nils Spacey of Coliseum All Stars found the fuse box down in the kitchen and switched most of them to off because a flickering fluorescent tube was freaking him out.

I think perhaps the manager thought there might be some naughty action on the cards, what with us stuck all alone in that lift, and with me being all young and feisty and sultry and him being a sprightly late-forties and chunky and moustachioed. Maybe he thought that making me his confidante made him suddenly more attractive; that sharing these secrets might somehow magnetise my body to his, or at least have me thinking I shouldn’t dodge any lustful lunges coming my way. However, I am probably the only one on this tour who doesn’t think that every opportunity, however unlikely, had to be converted into a s****l extravaganza just for the f**k of it. Thus once the information was extracted, I promptly sat down to ponder it, leaning against the lift wall with knees drawn up under my chin, which pretty much put the kibosh on any saucy advances he might have had in mind.

The tale he told me of Sindee and the Rock Star was this: Once upon a time in California, more than quarter of a century ago now, a child was born, named Jimi Casanove. His father was a U.S. Marine right up to the point he was shot dead outside a bar by a man he had earlier brawled with. His mother was a stoner who sometimes worked at a local radio station. Jimi grew up tough and wayward, passed around from relation to relation when his mother couldn’t deal with him. He got kicked out of every school. He was big and angry, and arrogant in a way that people who believe the world to be against them can be. He was a natural-born fighter who wanted to come out on top. Jail might have been beckoning but since he had been given a rock star name, he decided instead to join his cousin’s band as the singer.

That cousin was a decent guitarist with some nifty riffs that he’d turned into half a dozen good songs. He was all about the music. He was very much grunge-inspired and although quite heavy the band had a sombre feel. They had a decent local following of serious, boot-faced, check-shirted, near-suicidal teens. In short, the whole set up had all the charisma of a root vegetable. The newly-named ‘Cas’ Casanove was all about showmanship. He couldn’t even conceive of being in a band without all the associated glamour. He wanted booze and drugs and bitches on tap, or what was the point? He didn’t want grunge; he wanted good old fashioned rock and roll – and not the darker, sinister thrash metal, but the type that harked back to the days of Rock Gods and Rock Excess.

The band, having let him in, weren’t powerful enough to stop him. They shed a drummer for being too ugly. Cas, who still knew little about musicality, hand-picked a new one. Hair was ordered to be grown even longer. Drab clothes were burnt whilst tighter, harder, more ridiculous outfits were assembled. Cas himself often took to the stage in a shirt of chain mail, along with leather pants, thigh-high leather boots and a large metal cod-piece. If nothing else, it must have been hot as hell under it all. One time he did a show in just the boots and cod-piece. Another time he did it in just the boots and mail shirt, and got arrested for indecency. Whatever, the check-shirt brigade got left behind and the fast-growing new audiences were louder, happier, and far prettier.

Their shows were once described as ‘camp theatricals versus violence’. Cas was boundless and untameable on stage and he could do and say and wear whatever he wanted because he could always punch his way through any of the negativity coming at him. One time he poured vodka all over his microphone stand, set fire to it, and javelined it into the audience. In doing so he got an electric shock off the mic lead and shorted out half the theatre. When the lighting guys restored power he was still there, spark out on his back upon the stage. To the delight of the cheering crowd he resurrected himself, staggered around for a bit, and then grabbed a new mic and continued exactly where he’d left off. Sometimes you have to die to make your name. Other times just nearly dying is good enough.

The crucial thing was they had a guy that could write good songs and a front-man who proved to be not only larger than life but a pretty good rock singer too. The rest of the band quickly saw the attraction of this new fame, immersed themselves into it, and Thunderhed were born. They already had a reputation for excess before they had even released their first record. This only increased their following. One effect of the rock biz is that the more mad, bad and dangerous to know you are, the more people crave to be a part of it. If you can create a whirlwind, you will soon discover that those around find it almost impossible to run from you. They want to be sucked in.

On the back of a mini Stateside tour, plus some handy phone-shot footage that went viral of a huge bar fight the band got mixed up in, their first album debuted at home in the top ten and climbed to the heady heights of number three. The footage in question shows a glass-chucking, Wild West-style brawl, the highlight being when Cas is seen brandishing a table above his head, ready to hurl it, when some sneaky devil comes up behind him and thwacks him across the backside with a chair. Cas doesn’t even budge. He carefully sets the table down, turns around, and lays the guy out with one punch. All the comments below this clip include the word ‘legend’.

Their second album, Valhalla Calling, went platinum at home and across the world. If ever you wondered why these rock groups carry on with this life-endangering cocktail of work and excess of pleasure, then be assured that once an ego is set rolling it is very hard to stop. Success is the heaviest of addictions, the hardest to break. Excess is the proof of success. Any sign that the bandwagon is still rolling is thus to be celebrated. It can never be tired of, even if the excess is killing you. An example: after a gig in Toronto there was a huge all-night party at the band hotel. Come morning, bodies littered the suite. The air was flammable with booze fumes, and bloodstreams were still dangerously loaded with narcotics. The casual visitor might reasonably assume a bomb had gone off. Sometime around ten a mobile phone began to ring. Sheen, the Thunderhed drummer, apparently dead on the bed, somehow got this phone to his ear and grunted into it. He then raised himself from the waist, as film vampires in coffins do, broke into a massive grin, chucked his phone straight out the window and yelled:

‘We’ve just gone plat in Belgium, baby!’

Two minutes later room service had delivered a case of champagne and a tray of glasses, and it all began again. The show must inevitably go on until something dreadful stops it.

With album number three about to break they were already too big to do much other than stadium gigs and festivals. They practically lived on the road, performing and churning out material whilst the going was good. None of them even owned a house. Any roots laid were rented and temporary. All of them were seemingly rich but none really knew how much so. They rarely carried money since most things were put on tabs and a record company accountant quietly followed them around, paying the bills and off-setting everything against record sales. Those heaps of high-grade cocaine that used to appear as if by magic, there to dive into and all apparently free, those top-class escort girls and hired porn stars at the parties, they were all being added to the record company’s tab that the band would have to pay.

Some of their naivety might have worn off by then but the novelty hadn’t. Drink and dirty girls were still definitely at the top of the Casanove list, especially porn stars. My, how he loved porn! Those girls were his favourites. Screens on the tour bus always had some showing. One day, whilst driving through Germany, he was watching a scene from a certain adult film, and he clapped eyes upon the lady of his dreams. She was only in two scenes but he was smitten. All he knew of her was her screen name, Sindee Pink, and, judging by the accent when she cooed “f**k me, you sexy stud”, she might well be British.

Instantly he got the tour manager onto the job of trying to track her down. This fellow did the best he could from inside the tour bus and with a non-stop schedule, but eventually farmed it out to his nephew who was looking after a Scottish rock band on their tour of Northern Europe. No news was forthcoming. No searches of the name yielded any more information or details of other works the actress had been in. The trail went cold. It cut up old Cas, the manager told me, this failure to find her. He sank deep into booze for a while, so saddened by the fact that he couldn’t locate this beauty he had never even spoken to and make him his girl. If you didn’t know better, you’d think his heart had been snatched.

Move on about a year and Cas was dating a Playboy model he had met during a lull in touring, to help him get over the pain of losing the girl of his dreams. A burst of romantic exuberance, no doubt drink related, saw them tie the knot in Vegas. Female rock fans worldwide wept at the news and the new Mrs Casanove set about sobering herself up so that she was fit to ensure her husband changed his womanizing ways. However, out of the blue, the tour manager received a call from his nephew, who had been watching a gig in Denmark of all places, when who should walk on stage as singer of one of the support acts but none other than Miss Sindee Pink!

Except that she was now Sindee Liscious. Being a s*x maniac she had given porn a quick dabble while it seemed her first band was floundering. However, she was soon recruited to Death in Venus and her music career gained a new impetus. The dream might be possible after all. Porn was duly left behind and concerts were organised. The nephew found out the tour schedule and passed it on. Cas, with as much romance as his Vegas rashness suggested, got on the next flight out and turned up at the following show. No one but him knows his thought process at that time but he didn’t even meet up with the girl he lusted after. Perhaps he feared scandal and an expensive, disruptive divorce. Perhaps he just wished to stay honourable to his new wife. Whatever, smitten by Sindee he must still have been because, before he made a hasty return home, he had informed the Death in Venus management that they were to be added to the forthcoming Thunderhed tour as second support act!