Rock And Hard Places Part 9

Patti Scialfa returns tonight, with two effects. One on the sound-the doubling of the female backing vocal accentuates the simple cla.s.sicist choruses for which Springsteen has always had such an extraordinary facility. The other on the spirit-there's a more relaxed feel about the E Street Band tonight, more smiling; Steve Van Zandt's perpetually jutting bottom lip has retracted a couple of inches. "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" is exhumed from Springsteen's 1973 debut alb.u.m, and decorated with duelling solos by Springsteen and Van Zandt with the exuberance of kids silly-stringing the princ.i.p.al's car on the last day of term. It slams into "She's The One"; Springsteen catches a daisy thrown from the crowd and wears it in a hip pocket. Momentum dips slightly with the curious inclusion of husband-and-wife duet of "Town Called Heartbreak," from Patti Scialfa's last solo alb.u.m, "Play It As It Lays"-a record there was little wrong with, but which is ill-served by the cinematic bombast of the E Street Band, who are trained to build the epic visions of their leader. Which is not to declare them incapable of subtlely. "Devil's Arcade," steadily establishing itself as a cla.s.sic, is a study in restrained fury, dying away to a martial drum roll, the stage dark but for flickering neon beneath Max Weinberg's riser, an effective evocation of a spotlit airstrip, and the beat to which men carry caskets draped with flags.

Afterwards, I visit a bar rejoicing in the name of The Boneyard Beer Farm, its speakers pumping "Thunder Road," its chairs and sofas filled by patrons largely dressed in Cleveland brown, celebrating a memorable day. I find myself sitting next to Tim, a 40-something Springsteen fan of two decades' standing who has driven down from Detroit, where he works as a fundraiser for a Catholic high school. Tim identifies himself as "a conservative Republican" and has Springsteen figured for "a conservative Democrat," which is an astute call. Even Springsteen's most overtly folky alb.u.m, 1995's The Ghost Of Tom Joad The Ghost Of Tom Joad, offered no whiff of Guthrie/Seeger-ish revolution, beyond stumping for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and the dearest wish of even his most emblematically reckless figures (the narrators of "Thunder Road," "Born To Run") is, at the setting of the sun, to make an honest and happy woman of, respectively, Wendy and Mary.

"What his songs are about," says Tim, "isn't this politically correct welfare America we have now. They're about: do something. Go to work. Get it done. Take pride in what you have."

Tim is punctiliously polite, one of those Americans with the hopelessly endearing habit of inserting your name into every conversational foray.

"Now, Andrew," he grins. "I know what you're going to ask next."

So I do.

"I may be a Republican," he says, "but I can tell when I'm being lied to. And we feel like we've been lied to. And that's what I like about Bruce, and that's what I like about the new alb.u.m. He's a straight guy. He stands up, and he tells the truth as he sees it."

THREE SHOWS IN and I'm getting a sense of what Landau means when he talks about how Springsteen has edited these concerts. Nothing is tailored to the location, other than the odd bellow of the town's name-in Cleveland, Springsteen didn't take the free shot of the Browns' comeback, didn't drop "Youngstown" into the set just because it mentions Ohio. Tonight in Auburn Hills, Michigan, he says nothing of the travails besetting Chrysler, whose headquarters is here, and who have, just seventy-two hours previously, announced plans to lay off 12,000 workers, having already canned 13,000 in February (when the lights are up, though, he'd be able to see one economic indicator-the empty rear upper deck of the only non-sellout of the tour). The introduction to Magic Magic, about how it's really about tricks, is the same, as is the brief list of Bush's malfeasances at the beginning of "Living In The Future," as is the audacious toss of one of his hard-ridden Telecasters to a nervous roadie at the end of "She's The One." In the old-fashioned sense of the phrase, he's putting on a show.

With due respect to Springsteen's home state, this is the most apposite place imaginable to see him do it. Auburn Hills is a suburban extremity of Detroit, the town whose industry once built the cars that drove the roads that crisscross Springsteen's creative landscape. Auburn Hills isn't auburn, and has no hills, but it is ostentatiously proud of its receding heritage. Tonight's venue, the Palace of Auburn Hills, is usually home to the Detroit Pistons, the basketball team whose home jersey is trimmed by, yes, a blue collar (team motto: "Goin' to work"). At the risk of tempting fate, Auburn Hills could serve as the setting should some agent of Beelzebub ever consider staging Born To Run: the Bruce Springsteen Musical Born To Run: the Bruce Springsteen Musical.

Tonight, "Jackson Cage" makes its tour premiere, "I'll Work For Your Love" its first live outing. The segue from "Living In The Future" (from Magic Magic) to "Promised Land" (of 1978's Darkness On The Edge Of Town Darkness On The Edge Of Town) is, again, a jarring crash of experience against innocence. "Tunnel Of Love," the t.i.tle track of the 1987 alb.u.m which Springsteen recorded largely without the E Street Band, is reclaimed with a dazzling Lofgren solo coda. "Gypsy Biker," though its name might have been suggested by a computerised Springsteen song t.i.tle generator, is a powerful reproach, eclipsed for righteous anger among the Magic Magic material only by "Last To Die," whose key question remains John Kerry's only enduring political contribution, the one the young Vietnam veteran put to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and which should be above the desk of every head of government with armed forces at their disposal: "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" material only by "Last To Die," whose key question remains John Kerry's only enduring political contribution, the one the young Vietnam veteran put to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and which should be above the desk of every head of government with armed forces at their disposal: "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?"

The encore contains a moment of spontaneity. Springsteen mentions a kid in the front row, sitting on his dad's shoulders. "He can't be more than six," laughs Springsteen, "and he's been rocking hard all night." The infant has also been holding up a banner, reading "Ramrod please" (this request for the somewhat salacious cut from 1980's The River The River may have been ghostwritten by his father). "Okay," says Springsteen. "Unplayed in five years. Let's go." It ends with Springsteen and the kid making devil's horn salutes at each other, and a drum roll like a landing helicopter, until the lights come up and Weinberg ignites "Born To Run." It's one of those indisputable absolutes, like the Taj Mahal, or may have been ghostwritten by his father). "Okay," says Springsteen. "Unplayed in five years. Let's go." It ends with Springsteen and the kid making devil's horn salutes at each other, and a drum roll like a landing helicopter, until the lights come up and Weinberg ignites "Born To Run." It's one of those indisputable absolutes, like the Taj Mahal, or Henry V Henry V or something-a work that it is honestly difficult to imagine any half-sentient being quibbling with, and a product of definitively American audacity, of a young man who, thirty-odd years ago, decided that he was going to make the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time. or something-a work that it is honestly difficult to imagine any half-sentient being quibbling with, and a product of definitively American audacity, of a young man who, thirty-odd years ago, decided that he was going to make the greatest rock'n'roll record of all time.

AT A BAR across the street, more people for whom Springsteen has served as a soundtrack to a life gather to swap stories. I fall in with Dan, a silver-haired advertising copywriter from Huntingdon Woods, who has seen Springsteen more than fifty times, including six on this tour, and one Dublin show with the Seeger Sessions band. Tonight, he reckons, was in "the upper third" of his all-time list.

"I just love his pa.s.sion," says Dan. "He means what he's saying."

And we order some beers and talk about what that might be, and Dan raises the optimism that so many others I've met have also mentioned, and I say to him, as I've said to them, that that new alb.u.m of his, though it's one of his very best, sounds almost crushingly pessimistic.

"These," says Dan, "are not optimistic times."

And Dan mentions "Long Walk Home," which has, at all three shows, taken on something of the quality of a singalong at a revival meeting. There's work to be done, it acknowledges, stuff to fix and a reason for doing it that only an American-and, in today's climate, possibly only Springsteen-would proffer with a straight face.

"That flag flying over the courthouse," roared nearly 60,000 people of more than 60,000 different opinions over three nights, "means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do, and what we won't."

Corny as h.e.l.l, of course. But the truth often is.

10.

THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FEZ.

Def Leppard in Morocco OCTOBER 1995.

IT SAYS MUCH about the vertiginous nature of the music industry's decline that as recently as 1995 I saw fit to bemoan the fact that major labels didn't charter private jets on wholly gratuitous junkets to North Africa very often. Nowadays, the operatives of those same labels tend to run a nervous finger around a sweaty collar when you turn up at a playback and ask for carbonated water. The mid-90s were, in retrospect, something of a last hurrah for the idea of a record company as a profligate subsidiser of demented entertainments for music business insiders. This was especially the case in Britain, where a commercial boom and a general giddy triumphalism were being fostered by the rise of a phalanx of new artists distinguished by their unmistakable and-unusually-unabashed Englishness. As is always the case during eras of plenty, everyone a.s.sumed that the good times would last forever. Which is to say that n.o.body imagined that the imminent unleashing of a new form of communication would have the interesting effect of subverting, subsuming or destroying all the others.

None of which has anything to do with Def Leppard-but then, what does? While the idea that anything can ever be so bad it's somehow good is the infuriating folly of the irrecoverable aesthetic r.e.t.a.r.d, there are things in this life so overwhelmingly and guilelessly preposterous that they are weirdly endearing despite themselves: Def Leppard, like France, are among those things. Minutely though I have ransacked my memory, I have no recollection whatsoever as regards my a.s.signment to this trip. It may have been that I was simply alone among Melody Maker Melody Maker's roster of writers in never having committed to print any overt hostility towards the subject. It may have been that I was shanghaied by a cruel editor performing the common trick of dangling the destination in front of the journalist before revealing the band. It may have been a dare.

Whatever the reason, it was, as is always the case when the Fourth Estate descend en ma.s.se upon some location or event, excellent fun. An actor once told me, plausibly, that the worst thing about her job was the company of other actors. One of the very best things about my job is the company of other journalists. Given that the profession is-or should be-the last refuge of the otherwise unemployable, it attracts a disproportionate quant.i.ty of eccentrics, oddb.a.l.l.s, flaneurs and freaks, people motivated in equal parts by a questing curiosity and a horror of having to work for a living. I believe I speak for all veterans of this particular escapade in expressing profound grat.i.tude to the people and local authorities of the munic.i.p.ality of Tangiers that none of us were arrested, deported or chased to the city limits at pitchfork-point.

THEY DON'T THROW parties like this anymore. Record launches these days-if you're lucky-involve a free pint of watery lager, a dozen b.a.l.l.sachingly ba.n.a.l conversations with people you've been trying to avoid for months, and the alb.u.m in question played back at a volume sufficient to render it utterly unlistenable, even a.s.suming it wasn't utterly unlistenable in the first place, which it almost certainly was.

Occasionally, as closing time looms, old-timers will reminisce about the days when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, when a rock'n'roll party was a proper rock'n'roll party. Televisions rained from balconies. Swimming pools were for parking the Cadillac in. Cadillacs were for parking in the pool. A record launch was a tableau from Days Of Sodom Days Of Sodom, with dissolute celebrity helicoptered in from all over, chilled champagne flowing from golden bathroom taps, bald midget waiters proferring vases of rolled-up tenners, balancing crystal bowls of best Bolivian marching powder on their finely polished heads. Yes, the veterans recall, those were the days. All green fields round here. Still had all my own teeth.

So the excitement is palpable as the bus leaves Polygram's Hammersmith headquarters for Gatwick Airport. Def Leppard are releasing a Greatest Hits alb.u.m for Christmas. The long-serving Sheffield heavy metal band have proved beyond doubt that global fame is a realistic dream even for those hampered by a total disregard for musical fashion, a drummer with one arm, and haircuts-to say nothing of one or two lyrics-that would embara.s.s German football players. They are an inspiration to us all, and an inevitably chart-topping collection of their inimitable oeuvre is the least they deserve. To celebrate and, not incidentally, to draw attention to the record, Def Leppard asked their record company to think of something weird.

AS WE GENTLEFOLK of the press take our seats on the chartered jet-each with a customised Def Leppard napkin draped over the headrest-it just seems extravagant and silly, which is obviously no problem at all. The idea is that Def Leppard will play three shows on three continents in one day. Tonight, at one minute past midnight, they will start playing in the Moroccan port of Tangiers, on the edge of Africa. They will then head back to the airport, from where the chartered plane will fly them back to England for a lunchtime performance in London, fulfilling the European leg. From there, a bus will bear them to Heathrow, and a scheduled flight to Canada; the eight-hour time difference between London and Vancouver will allow all three gigs to be completed on the same calendar day. Def Leppard will then be able to claim a place in the "Guinness Book Of Records" for their endeavours, and hope that the attendant publicity will help sales of the new alb.u.m do the same.

On the publicity front, at least, this absurd stunt was never going to fail. Myself and photographer Stephen Sweet are here, for a start, and Def Leppard have never really been Melody Maker's Melody Maker's thing, their few appearances in our achingly hip journal generally restricted to the news pages, and then occuring only when one of them dies, or a bit of one of them comes off. So it's good of them to have us along, joining the hundred-plus other freeloading hacks, television crews, radio stringers and fan club compet.i.tion winners on the flight. Excitingly, Sweet and I find ourselves sitting directly behind Leppard frontman Joe Elliott-lest we forget, the man who wrote the line "I suppose a rock's out of the question"-and the ba.s.splayer, whatever his name is. There is something about his round spectacles and perpetually anguished demeanour that strongly suggests hours of leisure time devoted to the painting of b.l.o.o.d.y awful watercolours. thing, their few appearances in our achingly hip journal generally restricted to the news pages, and then occuring only when one of them dies, or a bit of one of them comes off. So it's good of them to have us along, joining the hundred-plus other freeloading hacks, television crews, radio stringers and fan club compet.i.tion winners on the flight. Excitingly, Sweet and I find ourselves sitting directly behind Leppard frontman Joe Elliott-lest we forget, the man who wrote the line "I suppose a rock's out of the question"-and the ba.s.splayer, whatever his name is. There is something about his round spectacles and perpetually anguished demeanour that strongly suggests hours of leisure time devoted to the painting of b.l.o.o.d.y awful watercolours.

The captain welcomes everybody aboard, and extends special greetings to his star cargo, "Deaf Leper". The members of the band, on whose career much of the movie "This Is Spinal Tap" was surely based, don't blink as the rest of the plane dissolves into delighted guffaws.

IT'S MY FIRST view of Africa: chocolate-brown beaches giving way to a few struggling tufts of nondescript scrub as the plane approaches the airport. The continent fires the imagination of the traveller like no other. For centuries, Africa has attracted adventurers, opportunists, glory-hunters and criminals. It's where people have gone to forge empires, build fortunes, hunt game or hide from the law. I have come to watch a rock group play in a cave.

A hotel on the outskirts of Tangiers has been booked as a temporary base, and we arrive as the sun sets, with a couple of hours to spare before the official nonsense commences. Most of the party demonstrate the intrepid, questing spirit that has made the British press what it is, and elect to spend the free time lounging around the hotel pool swigging free c.o.c.ktails served by miserable-looking waiters in traditional dress ("traditional dress": a universally-recognised expression meaning "Silly outfit and daft hat n.o.body around here would normally be caught dead in"). A few of us get taxis into town, and the medina. The medina is Tangiers' vast, walled market, a biblical bazaar of hustlers, merchants, thieves and, it turns out, guides, who are something of a combination of the three. A phalanx of these determined, weirdly short, mostly-middle aged men blocks the medina's gate.

"I will be your guide," says one. "Very good price."

"No thanks," we tell him.

"I will be your guide," says another. "Good price."

"No, we're okay," we a.s.sure him, trying, without success, to push through them.

"I will be your guide," says yet another. "Very good price."

"b.u.g.g.e.r off, the lot of you," we say.

"Very good price."

We're getting nowhere, literally and semantically. Several of us have travelled in the Middle East before, and have learnt the hard way what usually comes of hiring a guide in an Arab souk: a tour so quick you feel like you're watching a film about the place with the fast-forward b.u.t.ton on, followed by several hours locked in his brother's rug shop.

"We are representatives of Her Majesty's press," says someone with a two-surname accent, who has brought two c.o.c.ktails from the hotel with him, and is sipping alternately from each. "We can look after ourselves, and we have no need of carpets, camels or any of your sisters. Now f.u.c.k off."

It doesn't help.

"I will be your guide."

"Nooooo."

"Very good price."

"Go awaaaayyy."

The stand-off continues.

"Please, sirs," says a voice we haven't heard before. "It is better to have one mosquito working for you than to be fighting a swarm."

He's even shorter than the others, and is talking nonsense. But it's nonsense with a certain poetic, sage-of-the-orient charm. He also promises that he has no commercial or familial ties to any of the shops in the medina. We hire him. He marches us around the bazaar at double time and delivers us to a spice shop. The doors clang shut behind us. "Please meet my brother," he beams.

When we are allowed to leave, an hour later, we are heavily laden with vials of essential oils, sachets of scents and bags full of funny-smelling bark fragments alleged to cure piles, kidney stones, impotence and gout-a sales pitch I suspect has more to do with an astute reading of the customers than the truth. At a souvenir shop we pa.s.s on the way back, to the mortification of all present, the man from The Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror not only buys a fez, but insists on wearing it. He will live to regret this. For the rest of the night he will be plagued by claret-sodden hacks tottering up to him, announcing "I've forgotten your name, but your fez is familiar," and laughing until they weep. not only buys a fez, but insists on wearing it. He will live to regret this. For the rest of the night he will be plagued by claret-sodden hacks tottering up to him, announcing "I've forgotten your name, but your fez is familiar," and laughing until they weep.

BY WAY OF a warm-up for Def Leppard's midnight performance, a ceremonial dinner is held in a huge marquee tent in the hotel courtyard. The food is adequate, the wine appalling, the entertainment terrific. A variety of local artistes, all of whom look like they've recently returned from a raid on the wardrobe department of Eastbourne Amateur Dramatic Society's production of "Ali Baba & The Forty Thieves," eat fire, bellydance, twist themselves into improbable shapes and charm a snake. The snake-charming turn makes me think the same thing I always think when I see someone doing this: I wonder who the first bloke was who, when confronted by a rearing cobra, decided that the thing to do was not scream and run away, or whack it with a shovel, but sit down cross-legged four feet in front of it and play the b.l.o.o.d.y thing "The Sheik Of Araby."

As is the way of these things from here to Butlins, a few of the audience are embara.s.sed into partic.i.p.ating-though not, disappointingly, in the snake-charming act. Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen volunteers to be carried around by a large bearded chap in a turban who walks barefoot on broken gla.s.s. Over dessert, we are treated to the rarely edifying spectacle of drunk European women trying to belly-dance: it gets uncomfortably reminiscent of the hippopotamus scene from "Fantasia." Outside, Moroccan soldiers put on a show for us, charging around on camels, firing guns into the air and shouting. At least, we a.s.sume they're putting on a show for us. It looks more like they're putting on a coup d'etat, until they dismount and ask if anyone else fancies a go.

The finale of the sideshows is a performance by four men with traditional instruments ("traditional instruments": universal euphemism for "unwieldy contraptions made of goat-bladders, horse tails and cat's whiskers, which sound like someone cutting rusty tin with a hacksaw, and which n.o.body around here would normally be caught dead playing") who play us some traditional music ("traditional music": "fearful, tuneless caterwauling about donkeys, dead kings and/ or G.o.d which n.o.body around here would normally be caught dead listening to").

Before we leave, a be-fezzed photographer wearily makes the rounds of the tables, offering for sale polaroid snapshots he's been taking of revellers during the evening. To his disappointment, n.o.body really wants a picture of themselves looking drunk in the presence of a camel. He has only one item of in-demand merchandise: a beautifully lit and delightfully framed shot of the eye-wateringly gorgeous blonde woman who is here acting as producer with some cable television crew. "I'll have that one," says someone, daubing it with sticky rose fingerprints. "No, I want it," says someone else. "I saw it first," objects another voice, not a million miles from Sweet. A scuffle ensues.

IT IS THE kind of statement that would normally cause people to back slowly away, trying to not to make any sudden movements, but Def Leppard's show comes, all things considered, as something of a relief. The press are poured into mini-buses and driven to the venue, deep inside a complex of beautiful caves near the seaside. As we duck between the stalact.i.tes, those of us who've grown tired of the fez joke are now giggling, "Hey, I suppose a rock's out of the question," and listening to our hoots echo off the stone.

On the stroke of midnight, Def Leppard appear on the stage that has been erected in one of the bigger caves, and we gentlefolk of the fourth estate are herded away from the punchbowls in the ante-cave in which we're gathered, and towards what we're supposed to be writing about. A few protests are made ("We'll be able to hear them perfectly well from here," says someone. "You won't be able to hear them at all," pleads an emissary from Def Leppard's record label. "That's what I mean," comes the reply). At least one broadsheet reporter tries to hide under a table.

Def Leppard's set is an acoustic-guitars-only unplugged kind of thing, consisting of stripped-down versions of a few of their hits and several entrancingly predictable cover versions: The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," T-Rex's "Get It On," David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," Jimi Hendrix's "Little Wing"-PJ Harvey's "Sheela-Na-Gig" has obviously been dropped due to time constraints. In fairness to the Lep-I feel I can call them this-there's a minor revelation in that those turbocharged vocal harmonies, Def Leppard's signature on every one of their utterly fatuous but irresistibly catchy choruses, are not just a product of Mutt Lange's Mission Control-sized mixing desk. Tonight, on "Animal" and on, er, others, they're absolutely spot on, sounding like several jet engines being revved at once.

Def Leppard depart to an ovation from the compet.i.tion winners, polite applause from the media and, from somewhere up the back, a slurred rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone" from one hack who has evidently been at sea too long. Buses arrive to take us back to the airport. Predictably, a head count reveals that we have less on board than we arrived with, and a couple of put-upon local guides are dispatched back into the caves with torches to locate those missing in action.

By the time we get back to the airport, it's three in the morning, with the flight not due to leave until five. The entertainment available at Tangiers airport is somewhat limited at this hour, so people make half-hearted attempts to sleep on any flat surface. It looks like an evacuation from some variety of disaster, and in some small way I suppose it is. Those who haven't lasted the bus ride conscious are deposited in sad little heaps on the floor by the departure gate.

WE ARRIVE AT The Bottom Line club in Shepherd's Bush, London, with three hours to kill before Def Leppard's second performance of the day. Mutiny is in the air, especially among the press not due to carry on to Canada in the afternoon. The two leitmotif phrases of the morning are "Do you know what time they're going to open the bar?" and "b.u.g.g.e.r this for a game of soldiers, I've had my fun, I'm off." A full-scale rebellion is only narrowly averted by the serving of an immense buffet to we accredited scroungers.

A few of us nonetheless get bored enough to go and do our jobs, and head outside to talk to the punters waiting for the limited free tickets for the show. The people at the front have been queueing 24 hours, huddled in sleeping bags next to their camp stoves. "It's a privilege, man," one of them shouts. "It's history in the making." It must be wonderful, to be so easily pleased. He shakes a fist triumphantly and tries to give me a hug. Further along the line, a film crew from one of those insufferably bright and chirpy breakfast television programmes are encouraging some fans to sing their favourite Def Leppard songs for the camera. It isn't pretty. Those harmonies, like air traffic control and neurosurgery, should not be attempted by amateurs.

Shortly before the doors are opened, Def Leppard a.s.semble behind the crush barriers at the front of the stage for a brief press conference. They say that, gosh, wow, this whole thing is just so crazy and, hey, you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps, ha ha. I toy with the idea of adopting a stentorian Finnish accent and feigning outrage at the corporate decadence of it all ("Yes, Mr. Leppard, please. I am Sven Svennsenn, zer rocking and zer rolling correspondent of zer Daily Reindeer of Helsinki, yes, undt I am sinking zat perhapz you could haff been build.i.n.k zer hospital for zer unhappy children with this money, is? I am sinking zat perhaps zis means-ho!-zat your rock is out of my question, hey?") but I can't find a way through the rank of cameras. Besides which, the canapes are really rather good.

THE SECOND SHOW is much the same as the first, and after they finish, Def Leppard leave the building for Heathrow and their flight to Vancouver, along with the representatives of those press organisations deemed important enough to go to all three continents. Melody Maker Melody Maker is not among them, as they probably thought we'd only take the p.i.s.s, so Sweet and I stuff our pockets full of caviar sandwiches and walk out into the sun, looking for a taxi. is not among them, as they probably thought we'd only take the p.i.s.s, so Sweet and I stuff our pockets full of caviar sandwiches and walk out into the sun, looking for a taxi.

11.

EYE OF THE GEIGER.

Chern.o.byl APRIL 2004.

THIS IS A declaration that may well prompt throbbing of veins and empurpling of complexions, but here goes: being a travel writer isn't as easy as it looks. I feel that this is something I should qualify hastily, i.e., in less time than it takes someone to load a gun and discover my address. I therefore urge you to understand that I'm not about to complain that the fold-down beds in business cla.s.s don't quite accommodate all six feet of me (they do), or that staying, at someone else's expense, in hotel suites with bathrooms bigger than your entire apartment isn't marvellous (it is). The travel part of travel writing is a doddle. It's the writing that's tricky.

I'm talking specifically about what has come to be understood as travel writing as you generally see-or, I'm willing to bet, far more often ignore-in the travel sections of newspapers and magazines. To an even greater degree than other segments of an increasingly craven and uncritical mainstream media, these sections are hopelessly beholden to the idea that nothing that appears in their pages must be affronting or confronting to anybody whose eyes may happen to rest upon them, and especially not to their advertisers (who are, almost invariably, the people who actually pay for the writers' travel). So these outlets are, with a few honourable exceptions, difficult to write for on two counts. First, they're rarely willing to let you go anywhere interesting. Second, they won't let you say anything interesting about the dull places to which they are prepared to send you.

This observation is like everything else in this book, rooted in a strictly personal preference-it may well be that millions of people enjoy consuming eye-glazing advertising copy phoned in by some junketing hack idly rearranging the lexicon of travel section cliches ("land of contrasts," and so forth). Such a revelation would, I confess, make no less sense to me than the way that millions of people choose to spend their own holidays-which is to spend them in the sort of places people take holidays. There is no body of people, not even the religiously devout or jazz fans, that baffle and boggle me more than the travelling public. I simply don't understand why they go the places they go-which is to say, the places everybody else has been already. And I don't understand why they do the things they do when they get to them-i.e., the things everybody else does. The defining absurdity of modern ma.s.s tourism is the crowd perpetually gathered in the Louvre, beneath the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, taking pictures of it. a.s.suming that few if any of these people are commendably ambitious art thieves, what are they doing with these photographs? How does that conversation proceed when they show their snaps around back home? "And that's the Mona Lisa Mona Lisa." "Really? Is that what it looks like? I'll be d.a.m.ned."

This should not be construed as the lofty railings of a misanthropic sn.o.b with a rampaging ego who perceives himself as a capital-T Traveller as opposed to a mere tourist. I mean, I am a misanthropic sn.o.b with a rampaging ego, but I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that, when I'm working abroad, I'm really just a tourist with a press card and a certain implicit license to ask people annoying questions and generally get in the way. I also appreciate-that is, am frequently briskly reminded by friends who work for a living-that if your professional life is an arduous and regimented one, then the traditional holiday of sunbaked idleness punctuated by various ritualised merriments provides welcome opportunity to lift weary eyes to a view other than the grindstone. The problem is that the vista isn't going to be all that interesting, and certainly not surprising.

Smart-aleck travel writers making fun of travellers is a tradition dating back to the 1869 publication of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad Innocents Abroad, his account of touring Europe and the Holy Land with a gaggle of American pilgrims. It's a matchlessly funny book, but back then there actually was good reason to visit the obvious places, and see the obvious stuff. The tourist's world was still substantially mysterious, rather than a checklist of landmarks that look like the pictures (Stonehenge, if you hadn't seen a thousand images of it, would be impressive and moving; now, it's just smaller than you imagined). Most importantly, a century or more ago, such a trip would have been an adventure, a struggle, an accomplishment-three elements key to any worthwhile enterprise and three things missing from a sorry percentage of the modern jobs from which the modern tourist vacations.

n.o.body needs to spend further time on a palm-fronded Balinese beach. Not one of the six billion human beings presently breathing wants to see another photograph of the Coliseum. Not even your closest friends and family-or, I reckon, you-are interested in a yarn about Disneyland, or the Tower of London, or the Taj Mahal. So I guess the travel feature that follows is a kind of plea to travellers, and to travel editors, to recognise that the world is bigger place than they might think, and that almost all of it is startling, fascinating and wonderful (apart, perhaps, from Lunderskov, Denmark, where in September 2008 a local innkeeper answered my enquiry as regards what a visiting reporter might do on his afternoon off by mournfully intoning, "We have a pond."). Even-or, perhaps, especially-when you decide to try taking a holiday in pretty much the last place anybody would.

A DOSIMETER IS a grey, rectangular device about the size of an early-90s mobile phone. On its LCD screen, numbers flicker. These measure the radiation to which the dosimeter is being exposed. Yuri, our guide, explains what the number means in merciless technical detail, but I don't really take it in. This is partly because I never really take in any technical detail, but mostly because the one technical detail I have taken in is concerning me a bit. Yuri has told me that in areas of normal background radiation, like any reasonably-sized city, the display on his beeping, whirring dosimeter would read 0.014. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, but 0.014 or thereabouts.

While Yuri has been explaining this, I've been watching the numbers on the device in his hand climb past 0.014-quite a way past 0.014. I've watched them clear 0.020, 0.050, 0.100, and then carry on, like a s.p.a.ce shuttle's speedometer at take-off: 0.200, 0.300, 0.400. At about 0.500 I start holding my breath, which I exhale at 0.700 when I admit to myself that holding my breath isn't going to make much difference. Up past 0.800 the display goes, flickers past 0.900 and then settles at 0.880: about sixty times normal background radiation.

"They're called microroentgens," says Yuri, as I write it down. "M-I-C-R-O-R-O-E-N-T-G-E-N-S. About 880. No, hang on, 900. Something like that. Don't worry. It won't do you any harm."

About 200 metres away stands what must be the least visited famous building in the world, the most ostracised member of the fraternity of distinguished landmarks, the one edifice doomed never to dine at the cool buildings' table with the Sydney Opera House and the Taj Mahal: the giant grey sarcophagus that shrouds Reactor No. 4 of the Chern.o.byl Nuclear Power Station, which exploded in the small hours of April 26, 1986, belching a colossal cloud of radioactive dust across Europe and wreaking damage which may not be comprehended for centuries. Photographer James Reeve and I have come to redress the balance. As we wave the dosimeter about in search of more spectacular readings, we're doing the equivalent of posing goofily in front of the Coliseum, or buying postcards of the Eiffel Tower.

We're tourists.

THE CHERn.o.bYL TOURIST business is the least developed part of Ukraine's undeveloped tourist business. There are no hotels inside Chern.o.byl's Exclusion Zone, the 4,300 square kilometres around the ruined plant, blocked off by military checkpoints. The authorities don't want anyone wandering around the Zone unsupervised, so Chern.o.byl is strictly a day trip from Ukraine's capital, Kiev, a two-hour drive to the south. You book through one of the companies in Kiev that organise the excursions. They fix the paperwork necessary to enter the Zone and provide a car, driver and guide. There are no restaurants in the Zone, either, though lunch is part of the deal (the food, you are solemnly a.s.sured, is trucked in from a very long way away). And neither has any provision been made for people who might wish to purchase souvenirs. A shame, as the possibilities are spectacular: glow-in-the-dark fridge magnets, gloves with six fingers on each hand, t-shirts saying "I visited Reactor No. 4 and all I got was sixty times the normal background radiation."

Our driver, Sergei, forty-seven, knows the Zone well. In the 1980s, he was a driver for Soviet news agency Ta.s.s, and he took reporters into Chern.o.byl after the accident. Later, he ferried the engineers who built the sarcophagus over the simmering reactor. After Sergei negotiates the checkpoint at Dytyatky, which marks the edge of the Zone, the most immediately surprising thing about the Exclusion Zone is how unexclusive it is. This is no incandescent moonscape bereft of life but for the occasional five-armed zombie. There are thick forests of fir and birch and many, many animals: deer, birds, stray dogs and cats.

The Zone is also startlingly busy with people: technicians, forest rangers, police, soldiers. The small town of Chern.o.byl-now offices and accommodation for the Zone's workers-is almost lively. The Zone may be toxic and dangerous, but it was never wholly abandoned. Bizarre though it seems, the nuclear plant continued to operate long after Reactor No. 4 erupted. Reactor No. 2 was closed in 1991 after a fire, albeit one that didn't release any radioactive material. Reactor No. 1 was switched off in 1996. Reactor No. 3, housed in the same building as the gutted Reactor No. 4, supplied power to Ukraine until December of 2000.

Sergei drives us to the office of the Ministry of Ukraine of Emergencies and Affairs of Population Protection from the Consequences of Chern.o.byl Catastrophe (their business cards must be the size of dinner trays). Here, we are introduced to Yuri, our guide for the day. Yuri, a thirty-one-year-old former English teacher, and once the drummer in a local speed metal group, has lived in the area all his life. His hometown, Chernigov, wasn't evacuated after the accident, but he remembers that when it rained the next day, there were yellow spots on Chernigov's pavement. Like all the 3,500 people who work inside the Zone, he operates according to rota to allow his body time to process the junk it soaks up: fifteen days in, fifteen days out. He says his wife was worried about him taking the job-"About the potence," he grins-but says he's already got two kids, and besides which, he makes three times doing PR here what he would teaching outside the Zone.

Chern.o.byl's only real concession to tourism is the visitor's centre across the road from Reactor No. 4. The centre features an excellent model of the interior of the devastated plant. The detailed diorama includes figurines of workers huddled round the shattered reactor core: the blast blew the 1,000-tonne lid clean off it. I tell Julia, who runs the centre, that I a.s.sume that this is what it looked like just after construction of the sarcophagus was finished, in late 1986.

"No," she says, "this is what it's like now."

But, I say, puzzled, there are models of people in there.

"Yes," she says. "About 400 personnel work in the shelter. They do maintenance and monitoring."

I contemplate, for a moment, what I'd want to be paid to set foot inside that thing for five minutes. I come up with a sum that would enable me to purchase Ukraine outright, and have it painted.

"They make maybe US $200 a month," says Julia. Julia wears a dosimeter around her neck, one that measures c.u.mulative radiation and is checked every month to make sure she isn't over-exposed. Another dosimeter, mounted on the outside of the visitors' centre, reads 1.600-more than 100 times normal background radiation.

On the walls of the centre, alongside photos of famous visitors-Al Gore, Hans Blix-are photographs of what those workers in there can see: lava-like lumps of nuclear goo, cracking support beams, sagging scaffolding. Even under ideal circ.u.mstances, almost everything built by the Soviet Union was a jerry-rigged botch, and the circ.u.mstances under which the sarcophagus was constructed may have been the least ideal in engineering history. It isn't surprising that cracks have developed. In a brochure Julia gives me called "Shelter Object: Chronicle of Events and Facts," the preface warns that "Development of other emergency situations is not completely excluded."

"It's collapsing, really," says Julia. "There is work starting on it later this year."

After the creaking sarcophagus has been stabilised, Julia explains, it will itself be sheltered under a new edifice-a vast concrete arch, 108 metres tall, 250 metres wide, and 100 metres long. It seems incredible to me that this is the best we can do-responding to an atomic-age accident with such basic, primitive measures.