Authenticity

A short story

Dear Jack,

I want you to know that I really respect you for dying like you died. It was brave. It was real.

You kept me in the dark, man. I thought you were making lunch. You even took that beef out of the freezer. I had to throw it out. Fuck you, man!

I guess it changes you, if you make that choice. Or it makes you more like who you are. Remember when Darcie came round, and you were trying to make her believe that you quit smoking? You left a joint by the toilet. You didn’t even try to tell her it was mine.

I’m going to miss you man. I’m going to miss beer basketball. I’m going to miss the music. I’m going to miss your dumb jokes and pizza roulette.

But I’m not going to tell anyone beer basketball is a reason to live.

Rest well, brother. I found your book of songs. It feels like you’re still here. I hope you don’t mind me singing them to myself in my “ball-kicked voice”.

Love,

Joe

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In some of the biggest sunglasses I’ve ever seen, Joseph Parker is drinking beer for breakfast.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he snaps, “It’s made of wheat. What do you have for breakfast? Bread? Cereal? Cream of fucking Wheat?”

Music journalists are meant to be used to hard living but I’d retired to bed at 2am while Parker was ferociously awake.

“Anyways, I’m on tour,” he shrugs, “What do I have to do before the next gig?”

This doesn’t sound like the old Joseph Parker — the Joseph Parker I met when he was in his twenties, and was full of cheerful DIY idealism. That Joseph Parker would have packed, driven, fixed and all but built his own tour van. This Joseph Parker doesn’t sound like he ever has little enough alcohol in his blood to drive.

Still, that night I watch him captivate 300 people with the sort of acoustic set we hacks are almost legally obliged to call “intimate”. The only awkward moment comes three songs in when someone yells out a request for “Lost Friends”.

“Do that again and I’m not going to play it,” he snaps, “Everyone will have you to blame.”

He doesn’t repeat his offence and the song is delightedly received. It still has its strange power to warm and break your heart. When Parker croons, “I’ll take your hand, let’s fall together” grown men weep.

Still, it feels a bit like a man who once appeared to pride himself on defying conventions and expectations has become a bit of a nostalgia act.

“I took pride in being myself,” he snarls, when I ask him about it, “Why would I act like I’m 26 when I’m 52?”

“David Bowie was 69 when he released Blackstar,” I say.

“Yeah. And then he fucking died.”

In two days it will be the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Parker’s classic album Embryo. It was practically my Bible in 1996. I remember hearing “Lost Friends” for the first time — through the radio of my dad’s old car, while I was driving home from my ex-girlfriend’s house. As a young man feeling more and more out of step with the materialism and conformism of the ‘90s, Parker was like a post-industrial Jesus.

Pizza Roulette, in 1997, was another classic — establishing Parker as something like Elliott Smith with a sense of humour. His blend of the tragic and the sardonic, set to scratchily tuneful guitars, was irresistible. In 2000, though, Empire of Garbage was an audio catastrophe — an attempt to spread his wings that sent him crashing to the ground. A singer-songwriter best known for three minute songs with a handful of chords and a sprinkling of percussion recording an eight minute epic with a ukulele and a Hammond organ might have been ambitious but it sounded terrible. Then came album after album of retreads.

“What are you working on these days?” Peter asks.

“This and that.”

“I haven’t heard of that magazine.”

He smiles.

“It goes both ways, this interviewing thing,” he says, “I watch you all come in, full of book ideas and principles. Soon, you’re trying to sell a column on how your hair went grey.”

The next afternoon, after we eat breakfast at 4pm, an eerily beautiful woman recognises Parker in the street. Her eyelashes flutter like a bird’s wings.

“Oh my God. I love ‘Lost Friends’,” she gasps.

Parker smiles, grimaces for a selfie and strolls on. It’s hard to believe that this is the same singer-songwriter who had told me he was going to retire, a decade earlier, as we had smoked a cigarette outside a half-empty Electric Ballroom.

How does he explain his new success?

“The nineties are back,” he shrugs.

Specifically, “Lost Friends” had been used in the mega-popular teen serial My First Time and had then gone viral, as the kids say, on TikTok. But what did a man who was known for cassette tapes and alternative radio stations think about his online fame?

“I like to see the ladies dancing to my songs,” he says.

I’m struggling to write this profile. I haven’t even placed it with a magazine yet. I’m paying out of my own pocket. Parker is giving me nothing but scraps. He was right: I have sold a column about my hair going grey. This was meant to be a powerful piece about art and fame. Right now, it wouldn’t even get in NME.

“Let’s go for a drink,” says Parker.

Have we been doing anything but drink? We end up in the back room of a Soho pub, where Parker rolls more cigarettes than he could possibly smoke and talks about his love for West Ham.

“What new music do you like?” I ask, desperately trying to escape the subject of football.

“I don’t think I’ve listened to new music since 2005.”

Should I go back to university? Start a podcast?

Parker asks for a vodka with his next beer.

“About new music …” I say, “I heard Mumford and Sons are thinking about covering ‘Lost Friends’.”

“Perhaps,” he smiles.

“Is that a good thing?”

He rubs his forefinger and thumb together.

I must look disdainful.

“Oh,” he says, “Not indie enough for you?”

“It’s just — doesn’t your art mean more to you than that?”

“You know, I would have thought that in the past,” he slurs, “I used to care about being ‘real’. Can I say something off the record?”

“Sure,” I say, regretfully.

“When I started out, I thought being an artist meant being real. Then I realised that being real meant following rules — rules that did nothing but keep me poor. I wasn’t happier. I wasn’t more fulfilled. I was just poor.”

“You were respected,” I say.

“I can’t live in respect.”

He gestures for more drinks.

“Last year, I bought a house. My first house. I like having a house. I bought a new car. I like my new car. My house and my car are real. This is me. This is real. This is really me.”

I couldn’t think what to say.

“How’s that for a quote, interview man?”

We go to another pub. Parker has begun to walk as if he has gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. He is breathing in and out as if he has swallowed a wasp.

“It’s not like I don’t know what you mean,” I say, inspecting a sticky patch on the table as Parker works through his cigarettes, “I’m not going to put the brochures and newsletters I’ve written into my collected works. But I have my novel. That’s different. That’s special.”

“Oh, where was it published?”

He drinks another shot.

We stumble back to the hotel, with Parker singing Townes Van Zandt songs tunelessly enough that someone would have thought that he was the King of England before thinking that he was a singer. He flops down on a bench, halfway through “Waitin’ Round to Die”, and looks down the chilly street — almost drained of life.

“We’re off the record?”

“Yes.”

“All the way off?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t write ‘Lost Friends’.”

“What? Who did?”

“A lost friend.”

He holds a cigarette in his shaking hand as he talks in a shaking voice.

“Jack. My roommate. A songwriter. You should know his name. He died. But I wanted him to live on. So, I took a song he had played me and I played it too. But I guess when it was time to say who had actually written it … Well, I guess I wanted to live as well.”

He takes a drag on his cigarette.

“I never expected it to get so big … But I don’t think he would mind. I think he would be happy, actually. He wasn’t like me. He only cared about the music.”

The next evening is Parker’s anniversary gig. In front of a massive audience of ageing hipsters and tragic adolescents, he plays the whole of Embryo — his voice raw yet melodic, composed yet quavering.

I am sitting on a story here. Yes, I made a promise. But who hasn’t made a promise? Writing about this could do big things for me. And, besides, the world deserves to know …

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If you enjoyed this, you might like my earlier book of short stories.