Powder

Can any young pop group evade the pitfalls of fame, sex, drugs and all their inherent baggage? Will the Grams headline Glastonbury? And, crucially, can their guitarist achieve orgasm with a fully-limbed lover?

Part One
Getting There

Keva had bought his NME twenty-five minutes ago, but only now could he bring himself to look at it. This was not something that'd just go away if he binned the mag. He could leave the cafe, walk back to the flat, walk away from it all, lock himself in, but this awful thing would still be there when he came out again. He was going to have to take his medicine and read the fucking thing.

He'd been all too well aware that Sensira were starting to do it, but this, the scale of it, the sheer bigness, was a total, total shock. From the moment he saw it, it made him ache to the pit of his soul. He'd bent down, half-genuflecting in the usual place on the usual bottom shelf in his newsagent, and there it was. There they were. Nothing could have prepared him for that stunning impact as he twigged who was on the cover. What he was looking at, there, then, in luscious, grinning colour, smiling from the front of the New Musical Express, from the cover, was Sensira.

Sensira! On the cover of the NM-fucking-E! Jesus! Was every fucking journalist and punter in this country a complete mug? Fuck! How could people fall for it? They're shit! They are such shit! Sensira, for fuck's sake!

They'd been cleaning his boots a few months ago. Now, Sensira, the eternal support group, were on the cover, in the middle, in the news. Keva, quite properly, felt his whole spirit sink again as he turned the page and forced himself to take it all in. It was too true. Sensira were news. They were Big. Thank Christ there was no one in there to see him like this. His face, he could feel it, was twitching with envy. He stared at the article vacantly, reading without taking in a word. This was it, then. This was how the end felt. There was no point, no point at all in his carrying on.

He looked at the picture of Helmet. The little twat even had his hair the same as his now. He was shameless. Keva tried to drink his coffee but it tasted of nothing. This creeping realisation, this whole thing was horrible. He had to read on. He had to.

`What's so damn hilarious, handsome?'

Lorraine. One of the girls at Keith's. Gorgeous. Tall and fine-boned, with a bent nose that looked great on her. You couldn't call any of the Keith's girls waitresses or manageresses or whatever. They all seemed to do everything. Lorraine, at various times, had waited-on, cashed-up, grill-chefed, sung `Kiss Me Honey Honey' for the students and chased out junior hoods trying to make a name for themselves in a soft establishment. She's one of the girls at Keith's.

He'd been potty about Lorraine, once. Plenty enough people had told Keva she liked him, especially since the band started gigging. He knew she liked him. But he knew, too, that if he were ever to ask her out, she'd put him down. No doubt about it and no matter, anyway. He was long past her. He lost interest once he knew he could have her. Suddenly, once the unattainable Lorraine, the object of much delusory masturbation, was within his grasp, there seemed no point to it. She'd end up leaving him.

Besides, the other thing about her, which people seemed to find cute but only made Keva wince, was her range of irritating Hollywood starlet accents, sometimes as many as three in one short enquiry. She could make `Top up ya coffee, handsome?' start out as Melanie Griffiths and end up as Jean Harlow. Marilyn was never far away, of course, either. She used words like `handsome'. He couldn't spend too much time with someone who did that.

Keva pushed the NME across the table to her, looking away in disgust as he did it. She clocked the accompanying shot of Helmet and snorted.

`Don't getcha knickers in a twist over him, honey. He's bogus.'

Coming from Lorraine it could've sounded pat, just another of her sayings. But she was dead on. That's exactly what he was. Helmet Horrocks was bogus. Seeing him there, now, the subject of an almost hysterical NME editorial, was actually painful to Keva. He picked up the paper again.

helmetmania! ran the headline. Then:

`Sensira for Arena', and:

`It's all gone bonkers!' - Helmet.

The gist of this news-spread, inside the front page, was that the demand for a show by Helmet's band, Sensira, had been so enormous that they'd had to move it from the Forum to Wembley Arena. Wembleyfuckingarena! Sensira!

`With capacity limited to 8,000 by Brent Council for the show, tickets sold out within four hours of going on sale.'

What? Limited to 8,000. Jeezuz! Fuck! He felt dizzy. Just a couple of good club gigs would do the Grams for now ... bring a few bob in, get a demo together, keep things moving, but ... FUCK! Wembley Arena! For that stunted little get and his phoney strung-out waster hymns. Twat! He flicked a look at the black-and-white of Helmet, saucer-eyed, scared, intense - a sickly child grown big. Keva couldn't help himself. He gobbed on the photo then read the piece again, the bit where Helmet was justifying the switch from the intimate, punter-friendly Forum to the enormous fleeceadromes of the arena circuit.

It's like, the kids've made it clear that they want the big vibe, the tribal gatherings. They want thousands of kindred souls, all together, having the time of their lives. It's all gone a bit bonkers when Sensira go from playing to four men and a dog in Eccles to this - but it's just the way things are going right now. It ain't too big. How can a party be too big?

In how many ways could Keva despise him for this fake, cynical rhetoric? Seven. The seven deadly idiocies of Helmet fucking Horrocks.

1) The affected, and improper use of like. Either the kids have made it clear or they haven't. It is not like anything.

2) Kids? Fuck off.

3) Vibe. See kids.

4) Tribal Gathering with small initials. Pseudo-clever tapping of popular culture, letting the journo know that he's not a pleb, he can come up with the straplines, too, while simultaneously letting the reader see that he's `out there'. With them. A well-deliberated, fake-spontaneous soundbite. Gobshite.

5) Bonkers. Slipped up there, tithead. Who the fuck says `bonkers' except you.

6) Four men and a dog. Direct lift from Keva, whose fine band, the Grams, are loved by the grassroot fanzines and are just now starting, with three or four other similarly poetic, melancholic guitar outfits, to be touted by the music press as the New Underground. In the Grams' biggest interview so far, a splash in Chasing Chaos fanzine, Keva pointed to a gig in Carlisle as being epochal, in spite of being attended by `four men and a dog'. Maybe Helmet was taking a swipe at him. As if he'd have time to, the twat. And that wasn't all he'd nicked. His whole look had gone from scruffy folkie in cord jackets to the cool, smart-casual look favoured by the Grams. Regardless, he still looked a Ted in low-cut trainies with no socks. He just couldn't carry it off.

7) Ain't. Nuff said.

That was just the news page. At the end of the report, readers were directed to an exclusive Helmet interview in the centre spread of the mag. Keva speed-scanned it for mentions of the Grams and the New Underground, but it wasn't so bad. Helmet was looking forward to Sensira's imminent tour of the States, which he expected to be bonkers and stressed, again, his bewilderment at so much happening so fast. He reminded readers that it was only six months since their first, independent single (`Noodledoodled'. Crap. Helmet guessing what it's like to be out of it.) had dented the Top 40, signalling the start of this unplanned stampede to Wembley Arena, Los Angeles and fuck knows where else. It was difficult to keep a critical distance (not half!), difficult to take it seriously. It was bonkers. He only touched upon the New Underground reluctantly, and only then at the journo's behest, hoping that bands like the Grams, The Purple and Macrobe `get to where they wanna be'. Helmet pointedly excluded Sensira from any `scene', but it was not a bad interview. Not like last time.

It wasn't even a year ago. The Blackpool gig. Wheezer had cobbled together a mini-tour - Derby, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Manchester, Blackpool, Liverpool, then on to an earner at Bangor University that no one wanted to do. The venues were tiny, mostly, but the gigs were going well, over a hundred at each show, touching two hundred at a couple of them. Sensira were going on first every night, with the Grams and The Purple alternating the headline slot, on the grounds that they'd both had Radio One sessions - the Grams on Peel, The Purple on Lamacq. Helmet was just made up to be there. He'd written to Keva about twenty-five times, said how much he loved the Grams, thought they were the only new group worth bothering about, the only band that made a difference to him. Next thing he'd formed his own band, made a demo - any chance of any gigs, anytime, anywhere? They'd even roadie for the Grams. Be honoured to. Keva didn't much like the tape but, so what? Helmet seemed to have passion. He was a dreamer and he loved the Grams - and praise was something which Keva could always tolerate. So Sensira did a couple of farting little one-off gigs with the Grams, kissed their arses and humped their gear. And then came The Tour.

There'd been a great rapport between the bands, an atmosphere of shared destiny, with the Grams the unspoken topdogs. It was starting to feel like this was going somewhere. Three years of playing in shitholes in front of twelve, twenty, fifty people then suddenly The Wheeze had come on board and started to get the ball rolling. Local press and radio. Bit of a following in Liverpool, then the Peel session and this little tour. Decent PA systems. Soundchecks. Crowds which, though still modest, formed enough of a throng to infiltrate the Bermuda Crescent, that semi-circle of dance floor in front of the stage where no fan dared to tread. There'd been nights not so long ago, nights like Carlisle, when the Grams had been on fire and you could sense that the handful there just wanted to get into it, hurl themselves to the front an...