The hotel stood in a desolate side-alley as grey as the morning just behind the station. It would have been quicker to walk but he was dog-tired, aching in every joint after travelling by train all night. He paid off the driver and studied the façade – four storeys rendered and painted some indefinable dirty green with a large neon sign shining dully and welcoming him to the City Hotel.

‘Guten Morgen.’

The receptionist looked up from a computer screen, shoved his chair back and got to his feet. A gummy-eyed young Prussian with short, dark, dishevelled hair and protruding ears. White shirt, black waistcoat. A hand twitched on the clock behind him. It was just past half-past five.

‘Morning,’ he replied in English, leaning against the veneered counter with its collection of postcards and tourist brochures. ‘Cox. It has been booked. What time is breakfast?’

‘Breakfast is served from six o’clock,’ said the receptionist, growling his r’s, and he pointed, ‘There.’

Half-turning, it was only now that he saw the plants that formed a shield and behind them some small round coffee tables and a buffet table covered with a white cloth along the end wall, empty apart from a couple of thermos flasks with their lids half unscrewed.

He was given his key, and there was hardly room in the little lift for him, his trolley suitcase and his guitar case. Slow and patient, the lift rumbled upwards through the building and stopped with a slight jolt. Then down a narrow corridor, a razor humming behind a door, to room 408. He took a bottle of mineral water from the minibar and used it to swill down a couple of Paracetamol, flung himself fully-dressed on the made-up single bed – just a half-hour’s kip, afterwards a shower and then a decent breakfast. He hadn’t really eaten anything to speak of since the gig yesterday evening.

When he woke the headache was still there. His joints were stiff and sore and he was clammy with sweat – should have got out of his clothes. How long had he slept? A little more than an hour. A good strong cuppa would really do wonders. The room was already getting frowsty. He turned down the radiator, opened the window wide and a cold wind rushed in making the curtains billow. Opposite he could see a white 60’s style office block in functionalist style, the windows still dark, with a Greek restaurant on the ground floor that looked as if had given up the ghost. Its windows were covered with brown paper and some flyers had been thrust in behind the railings of the entrance.

After breakfast he stepped out into the street to smoke a cigarette, but it was bitter cold and he had to watch out for his voice. He stamped out the fag with his heel, went back inside, tired and run-down. He had managed to notch up quite a backlog of sleep. All these sodding night trains because he couldn’t wait to move on – or rather, away. It was crazy, really, since it was just the same thing waiting for him when he got to where he was going. Grotty hotels, small concert halls – clubs, if he was being honest – nervous organisers with an apologetic look, the modest turn-out of people who came mostly to listen to his old songs and who clapped politely when he played his new solo stuff. But the night trains were actually a courageous attempt to avoid all the junketings that came afterwards in random drinking dens, the tippling in his hotel room in the company of the remote control. If the chance arose and it fitted his schedule, he would hop onto a night train and sit there resting his head against the glass as the train raced through the dark, through the night, dozing, listening to music on his iPod, making a few notes, slipping in and out of sleep, waking, stiff in his joints but free at least of a hangover. And the other day, somewhere or other in northernGermany, in some medium-sized town or other, he had been walking through the morning rush on the station when a youngish man stopped in his tracks staring at him incredulously, as though he had fallen out of the sky. As in a sense he had.

Yes.

His room hadn’t been done, of course. He closed the window and flung himself on the bed. Hoped he could bloody well sleep. But he knew that his thoughts would soon be milling through his head just like all those people on all those cold and busy stations. There was no getting away from it, and it was too early to have a drink. On principle he never rang for a prostitute. Why pay for what you could get for free?

It was so predictable. This time, too, the same old story. Always ended with him lying here, brooding. Even though he tried to think positive. It was a miracle he was still alive, that he could still write songs (even though the reviewers thought otherwise). There, see! The boat’s already scuppered. After two positive seconds. Perhaps it would be better to be realistic. If things went on like this, the money would soon have disappeared; like all those fleeting acquaintances had done long ago. His wasn’t the first case like that, was it? After la dolce vita, after the whirl of wild high living and constant intoxication, what was left was only a bitter aftertaste. Jeez. How pathetic! A couple of years earlier, his record company had dumped him in the nearest public litter bin, and Neil, the only one of the band he saw now and then, had driven smack into the front of a lorry on his Yamaha; they had found his one leg fifty yards away in a field. At the time they had already been split up four or five years, he had put together two albums in his own name, the first selling reasonably, the second being a major flop. When Neil died he was way out in the country, sitting up there in Scotland (not a pub or anything for miles around), clean as a whistle and full of the joys, hadn’t touched a drop for two months – even the fat pigeons had come to rest. He’d had no inkling of what had happened until The Sun knocked at the door. The following day there was a photo of him in the paper with his mouth half-open; the photographer snapped the shot just as he was opening the door thinking rather absently that it was the postman, who was the only person to call by round there, so yes, caught there in the paper he had actually look pretty surprised, shocked even, and in a way the headline wasn’t a lie: ‘Dean Cox in shock at fatal accident for Spell drummer.’

He had gone down to London to take part in the funeral, and he was feeling ready for a new start. He had got some good stuff written up there inScotland, maybe because he hadn’t been doped to the eyeballs at the same time. Everything was right as rain again, apart from Neil being dead, of course, but in fact he had always thought that Neil would die young. He just hadn’t reckoned on it happening on a country road inNorfolk. What was the idiot doing there anyway?

The media turn-out at the funeral had been massive. Really massive. It was just like those first surrealistic days when they made their breakthrough; one day they were sitting smoking in Neil’s pit, squabbling about who was going to go down and steal beer from Safeways, the next they couldn’t walk the streets in peace. Long time ago now. He loved London, so magnificent, so comfortless, and everything had been compacted into that weird and blue-grey day at the churchyard in Twickenham with Neil’s sobbing mother, a broad-beamed cleaner in a fur coat, a present from her famous son, the red-cheeked soak of a step-father who lapped up all the homage, the noise of the traffic passing, completely indifferent, along Hospital Bridge Road, the planes making their descent towards Heathrow. He felt he was back; he could sense it. Londonhad been his home ground and it still was, this crazy city always gave him a kick – more than that, it gave him wings. He could fly. The fat pigeons were also beside themselves, clucking and cooing away, happy to be back. Surprisingly enough, Jamie, whom he hadn’t seen since the court case, was there. He hadn’t expected that. As always he looked completely castrated without his guitar. They nodded curtly to each other, and that was that. With Simon, the bass player – he was living inDevon now with his potter wife and a child or two, he was never quite sure – he ran the gauntlet between the journalists and the photographers out to the waiting cars. Bloody great black monster Daimlers. Like being in a film, again.

‘Imagine Jamie pitching up! Could have knocked me down with a feather!’ Simon said, as they drove away. ‘Did you see the coat he was wearing, man? Liberace would die of envy, if he wasn’t already dead.’

‘Bought with my money,’ he hissed, and immediately regretted it. The last thing he needed was for Simon to begin demanding royalties, too, and start proceedings. ‘What else are you doing with yourself down there inDevon?’

‘Fuck all,’ Simon smiled, showing his crooked teeth. ‘Growing a few vegetables. Playing.’

‘With your pecker?’

‘Mostly just computer games.’

After the wake came some wild days, or rather weeks, it must have been, when suddenly everything was almost like the old days with loads of parties and girls and reunions, living it up in a long white stream. And then it was back to the daily grind, the job of finding a record company. But with Neil’s death a door had opened wide, he had to admit it. Radio stations were playing old Spell hits, the papers were reminiscing about the days when The Spell were kings of the new wave of glam rock. Recording companies were suddenly prepared to talk again. A contract was signed. He was full of energy and optimism, and he would show them, he would – especially Jamie, who thought he was fucking Johnny Marr. There was still money in the business then, the music industry still existed then, but why pay for what you could get for free? He had spent a year in three different studios, and suddenly all that dazzling impulsiveness of theHighlands had leeched away, drowned somewhere behind the mixing desk, but he wouldn’t put the blame on anyone, even though he probably should have chosen a different producer. It had been an honest attempt at an honest comeback, and the tour at least had been moderately successful. But then they had dumped him, and he had carried the can for his last album himself. It had been expensive, very expensive.

He could sit on the night train or in a hotel room or in a lousy bar in a town somewhere on the continent looking back at these things until their edges blurred into bitterness. Or he could look even further back, to their breakthrough, their moment of greatness – the festivals, Spellmania, the gold and platinum discs, the first appearance on Top of the Pops for the BBC.

However he looked at it, it was all in the past now. When all was said and done, he might just as well lie down and die here in this crappy hotel room, except he was English, for Christ’s sake, son of proud and pugnaciousAlbion. He wouldn’t bloody give up, not yet. He still had a few savings left – not much, though he had, thank God, managed to buy a big place for his folks. Apart from that he didn’t have much, just a homepage, somewhere between thirty and forty tight flounce shirts and almost just as many pairs of boots and shoes, some of them hand-sewn. And Craig, manager, drinking mate, comrade-at-arms. A tiny and expensive flat in Bayswater. But no driving licence and no children (as far as he knew). Just the urge to keep on writing songs and to perform them, even if it was just for one man and his dog – and perhaps a pair of corner tarts. But first they had to be written, and that was hard work, too. Yes, he was scared. No need for playacting. How long could he face it? And what was the point, when there were only about 150 paying punters, as there had been yesterday. In a town where The Spell had once played to a packed house at the local stadium.

Fog and mist and an autograph now and again, empty platforms and seedy hotel rooms and sad nightclubs.

Always on the road.

Three more gigs, and then what?

Well, he’d cross that bridge when he got to it.

Couldn’t sleep. Got up. Smoked a fag at the window. The office building opposite had come to life behind the windows, and an estate agent type with a slim folder under his arm was just letting himself into the Greek restaurant, while a young couple conferred as they watched. They disappeared into the gloom of the ground floor, and he flicked his stub out of the window, watched it fall through the air and land in the gutter. The world was simple after all, and it was all so easy. One flick, and you were gone.

(Excerpted from the novel “The Old World”.)