Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
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Page 22 of 112
6/20/2006
“Fine.”
“I’ll start with your news before I tell him mine, obviously. Mine isn’t much, really, just about
someone playing at the Harry Lauder tomorrow night. So I’ll tell him before that. Good news and bad
news, kind of thing,” Dick says.
He laughs nervously. “Or rather, bad news and good news, because he likes this person playing at the
Harry Lauder.” A look of horror crosses his face. “I mean, he liked Laura too, I didn’t mean that. And he
likes you. It’s just that … ”
I tell him that I know what he meant, and ask him to make me a cup of coffee.
“Sure. Course. Rob, look. Do you want to … have a chat about it, kind of thing”
For a moment, I’m almost tempted: a heart-to-heart with Dick would be a once-in-a-lifetime
experience. But I tell him there’s nothing to say, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me.
Four
The three of us go to the Harry Lauder. Things are cool with Barry now; Dick filled him in when he
came back to the shop, and the two of them are doing their best to look after me. Barry has made me an
elaborately annotated compilation tape, and Dick now rephrases his questions four or five times instead
of the usual two or three. And they more or less insisted that I came to this gig with them.
It’s an enormous pub, the Lauder, with ceilings so high that the cigarette smoke gathers above your
head like a cartoon cloud. It’s tatty, and drafty, and the benches have had the stuffing slashed out of
them, and the staff are surly, and the regular clientele are either terrifying or unconscious, and the toilets
are wet and smelly, and there’s nothing to eat in the evening, and the wine is hilariously bad, and the
bitter is fizzy and much too cold; in other words, it’s a run-of-the-mill north London pub. We don’t
come here that often, even though it’s only up the road, because the bands that usually play here are the
kind of abysmal second-division punk group you’d pay half your wages not to listen to. Occasionally,
though, like tonight, they stick on some obscure American folk/country artist, someone with a cult
following which could arrive together in the same car. The pub’s nearly a third full, which is pretty
good, and when we walk in Barry points out Andy Kershaw and a guy who writes for Time Out. This is
as buzzy as the Lauder ever gets.
The woman we have come to see is called Marie LaSalle; she’s got a couple of solo records out on an
independent label, and once had one of her songs covered by Nanci Griffith. Dick says Marie lives here
now; he read somewhere that she finds England more open to the kind of music she makes, which
means, presumably, that we’re cheerfully indifferent rather than actively hostile. There are a lot of single
men here, not single as in unmarried, but single as in no friends. In this sort of company the three of
us—me morose and monosyllabic, Dick nervy and shy, Barry solicitously self-censoring—constitute a
wild and massive office outing.
There’s no support, just a crappy PA system squelching out tasteful country-rock, and people stand
around cradling their pints and reading the handbills that were thrust at them on the way in. Marie
LaSalle comes onstage (as it were—there is a little platform and a couple of microphones a few yards in
front of us) at nine; by five past nine, to my intense irritation and embarrassment, I’m in tears, and the
feel-nothing world that I’ve been living in for the last few days has vanished.
There are many songs that I’ve been trying to avoid since Laura went, but the song that Marie LaSalle
opens with, the song that makes me cry, is not one of them. The song that makes me cry has never made
me cry before; in fact, the song that makes me cry used to make me puke. When it was a hit, I was at
college, and Charlie and I used to roll our eyes and stick our fingers down our throats when somebody—
invariably a geography student, or a girl training to be a primary school teacher (and I don’t see how you
can be accused of snobbishness if all you are doing is stating the plain, simple truth), put it on the
jukebox in the bar. The song that makes me cry is Marie LaSalle’s version of Peter Frampton’s ‘Baby, I
Love Your Way.’
Imagine standing with Barry, and Dick, in his Lemon-heads T-shirt, and listening to a cover version of