Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash
Recently a show aired here in New Zealand on a Demand website called ‘Bloodlands’. The series was released in February 2021 and stars James Nesbitt. The show is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Bloodlands flashes back to talking about The Troubles. The Troubles ended officially in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
I mention this because the show threw me down a wormhole on the 29th of December 2002 when I was with the ska band called Bad Manners and the gig was at the Belfast Empire Music Hall. We had already finished the European leg of the tour and survived Doug, stage name Buster Blood Vessel getting meningitis and ending up in an ICU back in London for a while, so it was grand to be back on tour again. The Belfast Empire is an amazing venue, I remember going backstage to inhale the rider when I saw that Nick Cave had signed the wall. I leaned into the signed wall and went to kiss it when Carlton Hunt, the drummer for Bad Manners and also my fiance saw me and laughed at me. I joked about loving Nick more than him.
Carlton and I had met around a fire in 2001, after a gig of Bad Manners here in New Zealand. A friend had taken me to the gig for a laugh, I had never experienced ska music before. I had been working in the music industry for a few years by then and was used to just sashaying backstage and not being worried about what anyone thought.
The lads asked me to come outside to the private party that was on for them. As I had not yet ever said no to a party, I was all in. Everyone was standing around a large firepit and drinking, some music was playing out of a PA that a sound engineer had set up. My body always starts to sway when around any type of music, in part from being a dancer, but also because it just simply moves me.
The party was close to the railway station and Carlton, the drummer and I talked about the history of this old railway station, I explained how the American soldiers from the US Marine Corps had used it during World War two when they set up camp just up the road. It was a base for them when they were fighting the war in the South Pacific. Carlton smiled then he started to quote something that rattled me deeply into my core he quoted “She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggage. Through the wide doors of the sheds, she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing …”
Quote from ‘Everline’ story in the book called Dubliners by James Joyce.
The very same paralysis written by James Joyce slipped through my body as I felt so seen and heard for the first time in my life. A year later when we were touring Ireland and we were sitting in a bar in Dublin, Carlton leaned into me and out of his jacket pocket he pulled out the book, Dubliners by James Joyce. I pulled up my knees onto the chair leaned closer to him and quietly wept. He said that it was around the fire pit back in Paekakariki, on the Kapiti Coast in New Zealand that he had fallen head over heels in love with me. I looked up into his beautiful soft eyes and melted like liquid metal does when put into a fire.
We had been having a long-distance relationship for well over a year. He would come back to NZ to see me as often as he could. He finished a tour in Japan and flew over to see me. After one tour I met up with everyone in Brisbane, Australia and toured the entire coast with them down to Melbourne. It was a bonkers tour, in part because they were also making a new album and in part, just because touring is a very surreal world. On tour, you see the inside of the bus, some scenery outside the window, the venue, the backstage and the hotel room. Sometimes when working on an album there will be a touring house, a house that promoters use to put the band up in for a while that is close to lots of venues that are easy to drive to and get back to the house. You develop a close connection with everyone, so when funny moments happen with fans backstage, it would just take a simple look and we would all know what the joke was. Your sense of humour gets very warped due to how surreal the experience is, especially during a long tour. One time when touring Europe I had no idea where we were so I asked the tour bus driver, he looked up, exhausted, shrugged his shoulders and said “I have no idea?”. The promoter came down the stairs so I asked her where are we? The promoter responded “You are in Haarlem”, I asked the bus driver “When did we get on a plane and go to New York?” The promoter glared at me with a look that still lingers and said “Haarlem in the Netherlands”. Doug planted his face in the fruit bowl and I was not far off joining him.
Photo of Carlton and me taken in the early 2000s.
My main job in the industry was with major gigs where I was a comms operator. I controlled all the channels as the front-of-house staff did not need to talk to the marshalls etc. I had also spent time on a lighting desk and was learning to be a sound engineer. At some other gigs, I managed the crew room. There were not enough gigs so I was also working part-time as a sex worker in a brothel and doing some escort work, which I had done for most of my life.
Carlton knew this and hated it. He would call me just as I was painting a face to hide a face. This made it so hard to get ready to be out on the floor. He wanted to make sure he was on my mind before I had a job, talking about his wife did nothing to stop this as he was going to be leaving her. Sometimes I threw the phone against the wall in complete disappear as I needed to work, and this was not helping. He knew I adored him, he knew I saw him everywhere I went. I heard him in the music coming out of the speakers quietly in all the rooms, I saw him in other men’s eyes, I felt him when they touched me, I tasted him when I had a whiskey at the bar afterwards. Some men wanted to know and would ask “Where are you?”, they all sensed I was not in the room. I would twirl my hair with my fingers and tell them that I am right here honey. I felt like the peace line walls in Belfast, in those moments. I had painted myself into a corner. The war between Carlton and these men was like Shankill Road and Falls Road.
This all got so bad that he flew back to NZ to see me. We walked down Cuba Street in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. Wellington is a quirky small city and Cuba street beats to a different rhythm than the rest of the city. Carlton knew this. We got to a part where there was a bit of a stage, he stopped and got down on his bent knee. He then asked me to marry him. I swooned and said yes.
We quickly set about packing me up to move to London with him. It was madness for a while but he got me on a plane. It was to be my first long-haul flight so I was terrified, I squeezed his hand so much he cringed. Of course, as he was a national he was out through customs faster than me. I rushed outside to hug him and inhaled a cigarette, as I still smoked back in those days. As I was lighting my smoke he was leaning against the wall, he said there is something I need to tell you. I shrugged my shoulders and said okay. He said, “I am still married, I couldn’t tell her, I love you so much I compartmentalised you”.
My smoke fell onto the ground, I picked up my duty-free bag and took the top of the bottle of gin. As I gulped some down, my mind was working in overdrive. I was over 12,000 miles away from home, I was 33 years old, and I had to find a way to pull my socks up and do this well. In a matter of seconds, my imagined life was over. I had to invent a new one. It could not be all bad.
I lit another cigarette, inhaled, blew out a smoke ring, had a moment of pleasure as I had never been able to do that before, had to tell myself to focus, and said, “Right, you have just turned me into a mistress, therefore I will need a flat, a credit card and a job in the music industry”. With his eyes looking at the ground he said “yes”.
Carlton very quickly got me an agent and we were getting lots of jobs working with corporate bands, some of the gigs blew me away, some were in manors out in the country owned by the landed gentry and other gigs were on the Rooftop Gardens owned by Sir Richard Branson in Kensington, London.
One of the gigs that Carlton was asked to be the drummer for was for a benefit gig for Dave Swarbrick from a folk band called Fairport Convention, also playing were some members from another folk band called Steeleye Span. The gig was in Gravesend, about half an hour out of central London. A place some would know as to where Pocahontas is buried. At one point during the gig, I looked up from the sound desk as I heard the most exquisite electric violin that I had ever heard. Folk music was before my time as I am a Generation X, so it was not on my radar. This man playing the electric violin was deeply lost in the music.
Peter Knight from the band Steeleye Span. Writers own photo. 2002 Gravesend, London, UK.
I had never heard anyone play an electric violin like that before, so when Carlton introduced me backstage I found myself even doing the fangirl thing. For quite some time Carlton had been writing poems about me, I adored them all and would hold each of them close to my heart. What happened next nearly made me faint. Carlton handed one of the poems about me over to Peter Knight and asked him if he would turn it into a song. Mr Knight read the poem and said he would happily do that. I looked at my feet and shuffled around as I didn’t quite know what to do with myself or how to stop myself from spontaneously combusting from excitement.
We toured with Bad Manners the ska band a lot as they are a very hard-working band for quite some time, and then we washed up in Belfast.
Out of all the places we had toured, Belfast made me feel the most scared. Carlton had already told me some scary stories from when I asked him about the rubbish bins in London not looking like normal rubbish bins, he said that was because of the IRA bombs in London, not that long beforehand. I was also scared because it was only in May-June, a few months before that Belfast had seen some of the worst clashes and gun violence for quite some time. Riots broke out far too easily, bombs went off. This stuff never happened in New Zealand so I had no resilience for it, I was on edge.
I was also scared because Carlton had to be back in London with the boys and I was going to be left in Belfast alone, I had originally wanted to do this so I could finally be a tourist somewhere. After the gig at the Belfast Empire, we ended up at an old manager's house. It was suggested that I stay at his house. I agreed. Sometime later the boys all left and I was alone and exhausted, so I asked to please be excused and to please find my room.
I was awoken sometime later by the sound of this ex-manager trying to break into my room. I was able to shove the bed up against the door to stop him, whilst I yelled at him to f**k off. I already knew that Carlton’s battery was dead so I called Rico the saxophonist. I was on speaker so his wife from Belfast now living in England could hear me. In her thick Belfast accent, she suggested I go stay at the Europa Hotel otherwise known as the most bombed hotel in Europe. I pulled the phone away and looked at it. That look that says so much, but no words befitting for such a moment come to mind. I checked with her by asking “You mean the same hotel that is the most bombed hotel in all of Europe?” She responded, “Yes the very same one, but it’s been a while so you’ll be grand”. I do not think I shall ever understand the Northern Ireland sense of humour, but I indeed did laugh. I said maybe next time. It was suggested since they could hear the ex-manager trying to break in that I call the police and ask for help, which I did.
The police rescued me and took me back to a station whilst they found a hotel that could take me in at 4 a.m. I gratefully accepted the cup of tea that was offered. Thankfully I was not taken to the Europa Hotel, but some other nice one instead. The phone rang at the usual check-out time, so I unplugged it and threw it against the wall.
The next day I decided that I would go on the Black Taxi Tour of Belfast, which drives to all the sites affected by The Troubles. Nearly 20 years later, I still remember everything about that tour. I am still haunted by it. I close my eyes and I still see all the paintings on the walls. Never to be forgotten. They are all in my soul as I bore witness to The Troubles coming from out of the peace lines.
Some days later I washed back up in London in my flat with Carlton. He had just come back from spending some time with his kids. My heart couldn’t take being a mistress to him anymore so I found another job as a mistress to a plastic surgeon in Istanbul and moved there for six months. By the time I came back to London, I knew I couldn’t carry on this way so I broke up with Carlton and moved back to New Zealand.
Post note. During my research for this story, I discovered that Carlton died in 2017. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. We had kept close contact until my life dramatically changed in 2010, and then we lost contact. When I read he had died, my hand went to my mouth and I cried. I have been crying for over a week now. This story is in remembrance of Carlton Hunt, Drummer and the love of my life.