Did he really just sing, ‘She’s somewhere taking a pee’? I think he did, you know.” - John Peel after playing Double Trouble on 25/10/92*
In the unlikely event there are any heterosexual teenage boys with an interest for joining their local amateur dramatics groups, who are reading this post, I have good news and bad news for you. Well, maybe bad news is overstating it somewhat, but based on personal and witnessed experience mark well what I say.
The good news is that if you join an amateur dramatics group at any age between 15 and 18, you stand a very good chance of seeing girls get interested in you. It happened to me over 1993/94 when I was 17/18 years old and I saw it happen to another friend of mine, a year or so later.
The bad, or at least harsh news, is that you will only be able to enjoy this status of being the centre of half a dozen crushes for a very short time before you have to decide how much of a bastard you are going to be. You start out by noticing a girl among the throng that you like and start making moves towards them, trying to gauge interest etc. Maddeningly, they are usually completely inscrutable in return, so nothing appears to be possible. Then you hear rumours about other girls fancying you, so you start preparing the ground with one or more of them. Things start to look promising in one direction, while other girls fade into the background and then just when tentative steps are taken towards romance, you hear that the first girl who you really liked - the inscrutable one, you remember? - actually really does like you. But by now, kisses have been exchanged or a date has been arranged which you’re going to have to attend while thinking about another girl and having to reconcile heart, self-esteem, lust and brain. There’s too much choice and you’re in the position of having to decide who wins and who loses the prize. The prize being you.
I was too cowardly to string several girls along, so always ended up making a decisive choice towards who I wanted to spend time with. Honesty was the best policy in my eyes, but the few times I did break girls’ hearts because I fancied someone else, I felt as wretched as it’s possible to be. So much so in fact, that my period as teen heart-throb was calmed down by me because it was just too much aggro. I cooled the heat down by dating girls who weren’t involved with amateur dramatics. It was the right thing to do as well because the relationships I did have with girls who acted usually fizzled and burnt out within 6-8 weeks and were invariably ended by the girls themselves. It’s not nice to find you’ve failed to live up to the expectations of someone who’s still to take their GCSEs. We’re talking low-stakes stuff though. Enduring friendships were built out of these teenage affairs and no one was left holding any babies or never talking to anyone again.
My friend, T, did try and play both sides against the middle when he inherited the role of teen heart-throb among the Cornish am-dram community and while he had more short-term fun than I did, he found himself similarly chasing situations he thought he wanted but could never quite pin down while having to satisfy relationships that would do to be going on with but which were not quite what he wanted. It messed him up for a spell simply because of how exhausting it is to keep that many plates spinning while admiring other crockery that’s for display only instead of eating off - or out ....Urgh!!! That’s enough twisted metaphors, how does this link to Beres Hammond?
Well, in Double Trouble, we find Hammond at the end of his rope. He’s sneaking back home to his wife or partner after spending an evening with his lover. He’s now at the point where he realises that awkward questions will be asked about why he’s been out till quarter to three in the morning and can he get the lipstick marks off him without his wife noticing them. Double Trouble looks at adultery from a perspective that I can’t remember being presented too many times before - and I would gladly welcome any other examples in the comments. Namely, the cheater coming to the conclusion that whatever excitement there may have been when the affair started is now being outweighed by the nightmare of logistics. Does he want to leave his wife? No. Does he want to end the affair? Possibly, but is that because he loves his wife and hates deceiving her or because he’s finding the concealment too much of a pain in the arse? It appears to be the latter, and Hammond knows what a cruddy reason that is.
When considering adultery, there are two questions I want to ask of committed adulterers:
1) How do you handle the guilt?
2) Where do you find the energy to cover your tracks and come up with all the lies and stories you have to tell?
In Double Trouble, Hammond has reached the point where that energy is starting to fail him. He knows that tonight’s story needs to be the best one he’s ever come up with given that the woman at home has made him something special and that he should have been home hours ago. Although there are allusions to tiredness (either physical or mental) and a wish for death to free him from the awkwardness of what he has to go through once he gets home, ultimately Double Trouble works best as a comment on the mundanity of adultery and how it ultimately becomes less about love, lust or guilt, but self-preservation. No wonder he’s exhausted.
*Sadly, this lyric video shows that the line was something less surprising.
Video courtesy of OneLove.
No comments:
Post a Comment