Cherry Bomb Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHERRY BOMB

  ‘Though the coating is rock’n’roll, the tough interior is about the capricious, bewildering whims of adolescence and young adulthood. Nina Dall is as singular and mercurial a character as I’ve ever been charmed and terrified to meet.’

  TIM ROGERS

  ‘Valentish has nailed the desperate, sociopathic scramble to reach the dizzying, depraved heights of rock’n’roll, where if you don’t hate your bandmates on some level, you’re doing it wrong. I laughed, I blushed, I actually guffawed. I couldn’t put it down.’

  ABBE MAY

  ‘Jenny Valentish is hands-down one of my favourite writers in Australia. Her first novel, Cherry Bomb, is full of punch, charm and sleek observations.’

  ADALITA

  CHERRY

  BOMB

  JENNY VALENTISH

  Author’s note: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental . . . with the exception of Molly Meldrum.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Jenny Valentish 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 1000

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 081 9

  eISBN 978 1 74343 777 3

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1 KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

  2 REMEMBERING THE BAIN MARIES

  3 MEN

  4 BAD MANAGER

  5 DUMMY

  6 AWARD FOR BEST PASH

  7 IT’S ON

  8 THE GOLD COAST

  9 THE BIG CHEESE

  10 THE UTE MUSTER

  11 CHEAP TRICK

  12 FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

  13 LOS ANGELES

  14 TALL POPPIES

  15 ONLY GOD CAN JUDGE ME

  16 THE AMERICAN TOUR

  17 INTERVENTION

  18 I TOUCH MYSELF

  19 TAMWORTH

  20 SOAP SCUM

  21 WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  22 BOSS

  23 TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP

  24 NO NO NO

  CHERRY BOMB SOUNDTRACK

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  An hour before the biggest gig of our career, we sent a roadie on stage and instructed him to stretch a silver line of gaffer tape down the centre of it.

  Rose and I watched from the wings.

  ‘That’s my side,’ she said pointing to the left, which was always her side. ‘Do not come over that line.’

  Less than forty-five minutes after that I tried to strangle her in the people mover. Then I strapped on my guitar and walked out into the lights.

  1

  KINGS CROSS SHANGRI-LA

  At dusk, I waited for Rose outside Glasshouse Studios and smoked a Marlboro Red. I smoked Marlboro Lights in private and Reds for public appearances.

  Kings Cross was lit up like a kids’ party under the Coca-Cola sign. It tugged at something inside me. If we weren’t in the middle of recording a song with John Villiers, I’d beat a path down Darlinghurst Road towards the El Alamein fountain—the scene of many of our early photo shoots—past the sex shops and bars full of dead-eyed groovers, to duck into my favourite twinkling bottle shop. I’d been drinking for three years but I still couldn’t get over the marvel of going into a bottle shop whenever I wanted and knowing there was nothing anybody could do about it; unless they checked my ID too closely.

  But no, we were working, working. I squinted down Bayswater Road, along the trails of red tail-lights, towards the bouncers on the strip. Watching them watching me. I shifted my posture. My cousin Rose (vox, bass) always reminded us that we should act sexy at all times, as if a TV camera were constantly following us. The way I rested the sole of my boot against the wall made my skirt fall slyly across my thigh, but if anyone saw the curl of my mouth with my cigarette in it, no hands, they’d realise I was daring them to even try.

  Lately I’d started telling everyone that I was from Kings Cross. The western suburbs, where I was really raised, were so boring that you were duty-bound to become an underage binge-drinking statistic. The trick was not to stay there. I was always appraising and eradicating my flaws, from embarrassing lyrics or eyebrows plucked into apostrophes to being identifiably from Parramatta. I watched the greats on YouTube—your Courtneys, your Gwens, your Stevies—and I learned.

  I didn’t know it yet, but one day my Wikipedia entry would begin thus: ‘Nina Dall is one half of Sydney pop-punk band The Dolls. Since forming the group as a sixteen-year-old with her cousin Rose Dall under the guidance of veteran producer John Villiers, she has written and recorded one gold album, It’s Not All Ponies and Unicorns (2012), and one platinum album, Tender Hooks (2014), and has taken home six ARIA awards.’

  There will be more photographs of me in existence than of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and any visiting dignitaries put together. I will only stay overnight in suburbs with a Park Hyatt.

  Rose was still inside Studio A on the leather lounge, trying a new lip gloss that created a chemical reaction with lips to make them swell. I knew she was really snatching extra look-at-me minutes from the band who were loading in, probably asking who their manager was and if they were signed yet.

  I was always waiting for Rose, mainly because she was obsessed with her hair and not mindful of other people’s needs. I don’t want you to dislike her, though. A lot of her behaviour was probably due to the meds; specifically the anti-anxiety pills she’d been on since starting high school. I wasn’t sure if it was her four-bedroom (plus games room) house or the lustrous shine of her inky hair that made her anxious, but those pills could really make you mean.

  My hair never kept anybody waiting. I could see it then in the screen of my phone, because I’d set the camera function to reverse. It was home-bleached blonde with black roots, and I parted it in a curtain to one side and messed it behind my ear on the other. It was waif, but, like, hobo waif. My tits were small, but in the style of Kate Moss.

  When Rose finally slunk out the front of Glasshouse with a million bag straps, bra straps and bangles clanking around her elbows, she was holding the lip gloss in front of her, as if to fend off an argument. Her nails were Sportsgirl sea-foam blue.

  ‘I can feel it tingling, but there’s nothing happening,’ she reported as I pulled myself away from my phone screen. She was blocking me with her sunnies, so I fronted her and pulled a stray hair out of the sticky smear on her mouth. We’d been grooming each other since we could remember.

  I wore: slouch T-shirt over aqua bra, Catholic-schoolgirl skirt (for the record, I went to a mixed public school), baseball boots.

  Rose wore: the same, but pink bra and Doc Martens.

  We liked to stay at the forefront of developments in cosmetics and fashion, and Rose had cultivated for The Dolls a distinct
ive look: one coloured bra strap hanging down, plum lips, cruel cat’s eyes, beauty spots. It was a bit retro. A bit Countdown 1985, when everyone else at our school was all about 2010. The eighties and nineties were a more romantic time for music.

  Nowadays record companies had exclusive deals with TV shows that fed the winners straight into their mincing machines. Shows such as Australian Idol, the primetime slot in which people were recognised for being special and were airlifted out of their provincial predicaments.

  ‘I once drank a tequila that made my lips swell up like lilos the next day,’ I told Rose, pushing myself hips-first away from the wall and stubbing my cigarette under the toe of my boot. ‘Or like Li-Lo’s.’

  Rose wasn’t listening. She was grimly fluffing her hair in the reflection of the window and popping her lips to ensure even application. She finally shot me a direct look. ‘You don’t have to come on to every guy we work with, you know. There’s going to be a lot of them.’

  That was really why we were here. We had come outside specifically to talk about John Villiers—and how we would have to be very careful, vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall.

  •

  There’s some footage of Alannah Dall back in 1986, looking annoyed outside the Parramatta Stadium. Her band shuffles behind her, holding their instruments, out of focus. She’s being interviewed by Molly Meldrum from Countdown. I’ve watched it a million times on YouTube. He says, ‘First the Queen of England opens the stadium, now it’s graced by the princess of Parramatta herself. Does this feel like a special place to you, Alannah?’

  Special place, I’d always think at this moment. I’d have made a joke about that.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Molly,’ she says, her eyes scanning his cowboy hat down to his pointy shoes. ‘But no matter how far you run, they’ll always try to drag you back to where you came from.’

  I knew that everyone in the music scene wanted me to admit the Dall connection, so I’d just come right out and say it. Mum’s older sister was Alannah Dall. Everyone knew who Alannah Dall was when you started singing one of her songs or pulled out your iPod. Everyone had heard the smash hits about Pink Camaros and High Maintenance, which was actually about drugs. Everyone knew she’d dated the dude in Roxy Music, and was arrested for indecent exposure in Toronto, and flew into Drought Aid in a helicopter with her own wind machine in tow. I could pull out my wallet and show you a family snap to prove it, of Rose and me at just five years old, with our mothers frowsy and tight-lipped next to this exotic bird with the big hair. When we got studio time with someone as hot as John Villiers as young as we did, people wanted an admission of nepotism.

  Alannah was a stunner in an era when it was acceptable for a pop star to look like a plumber’s apprentice, or a sequined dinner lady, or a girl next door with a poodle perm and buck teeth. She was flawlessly glamorous, as though she’d risen from the cover of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, the sort of vision spray-painted on the hood of a Valiant Charger. Her dusky-rose pout and blonde wings of hair were given a soft focus for ballads, and she needed nothing more. ‘The Alannah’ was the second-most requested cut after ‘The Princess Di’.

  Rose and I grew up studying our aunt’s videos and coveting her safari suits with chunky orange jewellery, her satin jumpsuits, rubber bracelets, lace hair bows and stilettos. Some of it wound up in our dress-up box. That outrageous net outfit she wore to shake the hand of Bob Hawke; there were photographs of us both modelling it, draping ourselves over each other in Rose’s parents’ kitchen with the microwave still in the shot.

  TOP 5 HAND-ME-DOWNS FROM AUNT ALANNAH

  1. Frame your face in videos by slicing your fingers through the front of your hair. Look sideways through your arm disdainfully. Sing.

  2. Tilt your head back and bare your teeth—but only after applying a slick of red lip gloss. Stroke the curve of your throat, down to your chest.

  3. Do a double take at the camera at a dramatic point of the song.

  4. Live your life like a camera is watching you.

  5. Maintain mystery in the press.

  Being the blonde, I fancied I should look more like our aunt and searched my stupid face nightly for the evidence. My inner critic had already set up shop in my ear, busily reviewing everything I did, far less forgivingly than any journalist I would come to encounter.

  Face: an eclectic collection of detestable features. Zero out of five stars.

  Alannah’s peers—TV personalities such as Molly Meldrum, rock stars such as Danger Michaels, production gods such as John Villiers—became as engrained in my psyche as she did. Nobody at school even knew who Molly was, but each night in front of the bathroom mirror—appliquéd in my denim shorts and bra top against Mum’s authentically vintage avocado-green tiles—I imagined being interviewed by him. He asked me questions that cracked me wide like a coconut; revealed my tender meat to the world.

  And at what age did you realise you could rely only on yourself?

  Seven.

  Seven. Molly scanned the studio audience to make sure they understood the gravity of this. But still you managed not to let on that anything was wrong; not to anyone.

  I met my eyes solemnly in the mirror and absorbed his admiration.

  Not to anyone, Molly. I am a vault.

  Since Dad disappeared to be all hard-done-by in a different shit suburb, the focus on me at home had intensified like I was an ant under a microscope. At weekends I removed myself from the gravitational pull of Mum’s grief and spent as much time as possible a few train stops away at Rose’s house, in a part of Westmead the other side of Pazzamazza that real estate agents called ‘leafy’. We prepped our career by writing out Alannah’s lyrics on our ring binders and scouring her 1997 memoir, Pour Me Another. Just as pubescent girls in decades past had read Judy Blume’s Forever, we folded over page corners that signalled cocaine use and sex in radio-station broom cupboards. It was so inspiring. She was our Shangri-La.

  It was Aunt Alannah’s lack of interest in us that turned her into even more of a legend in our eyes. We relished the slightest flicker of approval like starving dogs thrown a scrap, never tiring of asking when she would next visit. It had been six years since she’d come to Taronga Zoo with us. She and my mother had a fight while we were watching the falcon display and we were marched out to the car before we could even get to the ice cream. ‘I could only hope to be as frantically busy as Alannah,’ Mum was liable to sneer, ‘but I am just a single parent with a job to hold down.’

  The need to stake my claim on Alannah ahead of Rose was intense. After Dad left, Mum and I went back to her maiden name of Dall, and then Rose Rogers started calling herself Dall too, even though she had no legal right.

  When I was a little kid I hoped Alannah would adopt me, but upon turning fourteen I decided to be more proactive. I wrote her countless letters in pink curlicue with pictures in the margins and tried everything to get her to write back: queries about what hair product she used in the video for ‘Accidents and Incidents’; wild hypotheses about what Michael Hutchence would have been like, which begged correction; bright observations that I’d better be careful cutting my arms because I once nearly hit an artery; despair about being anchored to my mother’s gloom; witty remarks about Rose’s character compared to the character of those rather less obvious than she.

  It was my pondering about contacting a local producer named Vince Rice to work on our demos that finally provoked a response. Such was my inability to grasp who Alannah might really be, I read her email in my head as though she were Nigella Lawson.

  Nina, she purred.

  Vis-a-vis your demos. Please don’t go anywhere near that ridiculous cowboy Vince Rice, or ANYBODY ELSE who works out of that studio. They are thieves and crooks and they WILL rip you off.

  You need somebody with a solid reputation and an ear to the ground. I’ve booked you into Glasshouse Studios in Kings Cross for seven days with John Villiers, a producer I’ve worked with a lot. He will take care of you. Do
n’t worry about $$—he owes me.

  I hope you work through your other problems.

  A.

  •

  Vis-a-vis John Villiers and Alannah Dall . . . I could tell that Rose was pained that I went home with the engineer a few days into tracking, even though he was cool and never mentioned it to John Villiers. I was thankful for that, because it turned out John Villiers was exactly my type: much older, steady blue eyes, able forearms, faded flannel shirts, kids, divorce pending. He winked at me when I accidentally dropped my Coke all over the floor and from that moment on he was a marked man. (If you’ve bought our albums you’ll have sung along to my exaltations to John Villiers on ‘Svengali’ and ‘El Capitan’, and been none the wiser as to who they were about.) He was inside the studio right now and I could practically feel the heat through four inches of brick wall.

  One acquired a certain studied indifference towards recording studios over time, but at first Rose and I had been cripplingly shy around the moody engineers and mysterious bands passing in and out. We’d head straight for the safety of the couch of Studio A and sit staring at our phones like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  ‘Bring some things in from home to help you relax,’ Alannah had suggested, down the line from somewhere glittery on the Gold Coast, where she lived these days. Alannah once caused massive fire damage to a studio in Sydney while tripping heavily. Legend had it a tapestry draped on the wall for ambience was ignited by a candle. ‘Make it your space. Candles, incense, wine; whatever it takes.’

  John Villiers (no one ever said ‘John’; it was always ‘John Villiers’) had his name on the back of every great Australian album since the late eighties, including my aunt’s last ever release before she mysteriously disappeared from public view. I’d been working on him all week, leaning against the vocal booth with my back arched between takes or folding languidly over the desk next to him, letting my curtain of hair drop like one of the seven veils. Once, I started lisping into the mic like Gossling or Julia Stone, just so I could hear him laugh through the cans. You got a good sense of someone by their laugh. I’d come up with a new, husky one like Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation.