40. SUSPECT 3: Archie

One time lead singer of thrash hip hop band Michael Gambon And On And On.

There was Archie too, who would have handed out a few tenners to Danny Eagle over the years, but otherwise it seems perverse to have the two of them on the same list. But Moses had to be honest if he had to be anything on this. Archie is a cider-drinking mental health nurse who used to sing in a punk band. More of a half-rapped guttural bellow than a singing slot to be fair, which Moses always thought was a shame because the guitarist had something of the Mick Ronson about him in his appreciation of swinging melody, and they had a girl bassist which made them immediately a great band, and a drummer who loved drumming, but then there was Archie up front thrashing around like what Rosemary’s baby must have been like in the womb. The band went through several incarnations, each name bringing a slightly altered line up, such as a sax player joining at one point for a short while, then a keyboardist, then the Mick Ronson guy went to Nottingham to study broadcast journalism or something and Archie’s cousin took over whose only previous experience of playing the guitar was strumming his sister’s tennis racket along to his dad’s Rolling Stones records. Anyway, a great many changes. Too many to list. Names included Pepto Dismal, The Fuck Magpies, The Phallic Palace, Throw Momma from the Train, Vagina Fire, Nazi Handglider, John Connor’s Pack’d Lunch, City of Ham, Eight Thousand Infinity Stones, Swizzle, Dead Birds, Breakup Nexus, Listen to the Hatchings, Media Empire, Official School Immolation Policy, Smith & Wesson, Swoop for Scum, Gentle Feely Feel, You Won’t Forget Us, Ambidextrous Flyover Suicide, and Rhys is Negative. There were probably others. Moses had said more focus (and less Archie) could have brought them some success. The problem was that Archie had trained as an actor. Trained as in he’d gone to the local youth theatre and at the age of fifteen had had the lead in an oddly erotic production of The House of Bernardo Alba. Years later the director was in the South Wales Argus for having thousands of indecent photos of children downloaded onto his computer. Archie had been good in Alba. Problem was, as an actor, Archie had craved roles to play but perhaps for reasons related to the intense techniques of the director, had no desire to return to the theatre. So, every six months he fucked up the progress of the band by shaking it up. In the end, by the time he was late twenties he was nowhere, and he’d also run through every half-baked garage guitarist in the vicinity, and nobody wanted to play with him anymore. He took a course and became a mental health nurse. Within a month of his first work placement, he looked 45 years old and wasn’t yet thirty. His love of amphetamines, now recognised as an addiction, was de-escalated and he only popped something on a special occasion like a Friday night, but he steadily began to believe the reason why he was dosing out methadone at the nut house out past the river bend and not headlining Reading was because he had been in the clutches of an exploitative manipulative drug maestro. He never named Aaron, and God knows there was enough people around to score from, but could it have been Aaron he so passionately resented? “If I could have broken free from the speed, maaaaaan,” he would say on a Friday night whilst chomping away on speed, “I would have had the focus to get to the top of the profession. But when they get you they got you, maaaaaaaan.” Maybe Archie finally got closure.