Daniel Eagleton
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An extract from Planet X
Across the car-park Julian continued with his warm up. He was jogging on the spot, rolling his head from one shoulder to the other.
“All set?” he called, as Henry walked back towards them. “Because this, my friends, is going to be the fucking bollocks.”
Unlike a lot of front men, Julian didn’t adopt some stage persona when playing music. He just kept on moving, feeding that skinny guy metabolism, the one that was never satisfied. And while Henry too ran on nervous energy, that was nobody else’s business. Keeping them grounded, that had always been his role, both on stage and off.
A few minutes later, headlights approached out of slowly dwindling daylight.
Julian stopped shadow-boxing and gripped Henry’s arm. “This could be him,” he said.
A dirty white transit van shot past. It hit the brakes, screeching to a halt just down the road from where they were waiting.
“What’s his name again?” wondered Imran.
“The G-Man,” murmured Julian.
The van’s brake lights flashed off, and it backed through a cloud of exhaust fumes, reversing between concrete bollards at breakneck speed.
“I’d know that driving anywhere,” remarked Henry.
To support his bass playing, Graham delivered booze for Oddbins wine merchants, and after years of driving for a living could easily be mistaken for someone on the brink of a road-rage episode.
The van came to a halt, and a mop of dirty blonde hair poked out from the driver’s side window.
“Fucking hell,” Graham laughed, eyes glinting through Harry Palmer spectacles. “Is this the fucking sticks or what? What are you lot doing all the way out here?”
“Working, mate,” said Julian. “You should try it sometime.”
“Get in then.”
Julian called shotgun, while Henry and Imran slid the side door open. In the back among several cases of beer and wine were guitars, bass guitars, an old Marshall amplifier. From a clothing rack several tracksuits swung, Adidas and Fred Perry, wrapped in sheets of old polythene.
“Alright, dude!” Julian cried, and climbed immediately over the front-seat to inspect the equipment. “You brought the gear.”
“Never mind that old crap,” said Graham, gunning the van’s engine. “Got the top of the range waiting for us where we’re going. You ever seen one of these things before? Classy as fuck, mate.”
Julian lifted a beaten, flame coloured Les Paul from its case. “We’ll have to see what we can do about lowering the tone, then, won’t we.”
Sat on a crate of Castlemain XXXX, Imran freed a can, and held it aloft. “Can I have one of these?”