Page 3 of Strum Me

Chapter Two

Brad

The pounding in my head is somewhere about eight on the migraine Richter scale.

The twelve hours of sleep I got on the plane barely made up for the sleep I’d missed out on partying in Australia for two weeks. Now the jetlag and the two cans of Red Bull are doing a tango on the nerve behind my left eye. That’s on top of the way the right side of my face screams every time I inadvertently make some sort of facial expression.

And it’d all be okay if I were headed for a nice, dark room and into a soft, warm bed. Instead, there are about a hundred of London’s most zealous music journalists and paparazzi on the other side of the door, ready with their microphones and flashbulbs and wanting blood.

“You guys ready?” Dennis asks us for the eighteenth time since he herded us into the hotel bathroom to give us his best pep talk on how important these press tours were to the success of the launch of our new album. I’d like to think he didn’t turn toward me when he’d said, “Well, just don’t, you know, FUCK UP,” but I know better.

“He means you,” Jez clarifies, without needing to.

I am notoriously bad at these things and usually walk the tightrope between saying completely ridiculous nonsense and clamming up all together. If there’s something I’ve learned about being in the public eye for the last eight years, it’s that there are some born for celebrity and schmoozing the press, like Sebastian and Jez, who can charm the horns off an angry bull. And then there are the ones like me, and to a lesser extent, Marius, who turn into gibberish-speaking spider monkeys at the mere sight of a microphone.

“He knows. Get off his case. He already looks white as a ghost… well, a ghost with sunburn.” Seb defends me, patting me gently on the arm.

I give him a thankful smile that quickly turns into a cringe as my forehead threatens to tear from my cheek.

Rubbing my temples, I drag breath into my lungs, trying to stop the thumping against my skull and will my headache away. It’s going to be a rough hour.

“You’re up, guys.” Dennis pats me on the back and it’s one of those rare times I wonder why I’m doing this. Then I feel myself pulled into a big group hug, my bandmates’ arms wrapped around my shoulder and our four faces in a huddle. These are the faces I’ve grown up with, gone through hell and back with, achieved the highest level of success with, faces I would die for, and then I remember. I’d be completely lost without them, doing what I love with the people I love most in the word.

Dennis gives us a wink and pushes the door open and there’s a loud cheer and applause.

Marius steps onto the stage first and takes a seat behind the long table, followed by Jez and then Sebastian. I hang back watching them from the doorway, wondering who would notice if I made a run for it.

“Go!” Dennis whispers and gives me a little shove and I reluctantly follow my bandmates into the ring of fire.

The applause dies down as we settle into our seats and adjust the microphones in front of our faces.

I see Dennis nod to us and then Hailey, our new PR rep and Dennis’s daughter, walks onto the stage with her own microphone.

“Welcome, everyone, and on behalf of the Rock Chamber Boys, I’d like to thank you all for being here today! We are so proud to announce the release of the new album, due next wêk, Chords and Chaos, and believe it’s the best one yet. We’ll be here for the next hour taking any questions…so let’s start!”

An ocean of hands rise up and I see Hailey point to someone in the crowd.

“Hey guys, welcome back to London,” a small lanky guy in a leather jacket stands up and addresses us. He looks familiar, but then again, they all do. We’ve done the rounds so many times, there aren’t many journalists we haven’t come across at one time or another. I just can’t remember the good ones from the bad ones. “Congrats on the new album, it’s great,” he continues. “But, just wondering, why did you guys change your name?”

There’s a twittering among the crowd and I guess a few people are wondering the same thing, even though we’d released a memo when we recently changed it.

We all turn to Sebastian, who is probably the best one to answer, and he just grins and leans into the microphone as if it’s not an instrument of evil.

“Hey Gil, nice to see you again, man,” he starts. Gil! That’s it! Ugh, how the hell does he remember these names? Not for the first time I can’t help but be in awe of my bandmate and his social adeptness. “Well, as you know, we’d been No Strings Attached for the last eight years, but a lot has changed in that time. From our style of music to band members coming and going. But we really feel like we’ve reached a certain stage in our music careers where we needed to make a change, to mark where we are now. And Rock Chamber Boys seemed like the perfect name to describe what we are—a contemporary music outfit that also combines the incomparable classic string instrument chamber music of centuries before us. We like it, so we hope you guys do too. But frankly, Gil, we don’t give a damn.” He finishes with a grin and wink.

And they eat it all up.

The next half an hour flies by pretty quickly, and I don’t talk too much, only once in a while when we see Dennis gesture to me and I interject with a quick jib or two just to prove I’m not completely mute. But for most of the time I’m happy to sit back and let Jez and Seb spin their web while I sit there behind my shades, pretending to appear mysterious. It’s a role I’ve perfected and prefer, and find that the few times I do speak, they tend to pay attention more.

A loud laugh from the crowd jolts me out of my daydream of going back to the hotel room for a long hot soak in the tub.

Leaning over to Sebastian, I nudge him and whisper, “What happened?”

He grins and whispers back, “Jez just tried to hit on that blonde pap over there and she told him she only dates guys who wear less eyeliner than she does.”

I can’t help but guffaw as I look over and see Jez is still pouting. His pride in his hairstyles and “face styles” as he calls them, is well known to anyone who knows anything about the band. His pout quickly breaks out into a grin however, and he shrugs and holds his hands out in defeat.

“Okay, okay, enough picking on Jez,” Hailey jokes into the microphone, before glancing at Dennis who twirls his finger, in the universal “wrap it up” gesture. “I think we have time for one more question before we let these guys grab some sleep. They have just come off a plane from Sydney after all. So…yes, you, the young lady in the back, what question have you got for the band?”

There’s a squeaking of the chair legs scraping against the floor and everyone turns to the back of the room, toward the sound. The lights, as always, are shining directly into our eyes and I try to block them out with my hand, looking out into the crowd. I see a female silhouette stand up, with long dark hair, but I can’t make out anything else about her.

Until she speaks.

“Yeah, um, I just have one question: do you guys ever intend on doing anything but ripping off other musicians’ work?”

There’s a smattering of murmurs and Sebastian spits out his water next to me.

But it’s not the question that has my heart skipping a beat.

It’s the voice.

It’s hers.

It could only ever be hers.

Butter.