Trollheart

Although I’m only today opening my Music Detective Agency, I’ve been doing this sort of thing on and off for at least the last fifteen years - tracking down artists, finding out about them, how they got started, what their music was like, and in some cases, how they ended up or even broke up. I approached this in a small way when I reviewed the metal compilation albums during one of the Metal Months, between 2013 and 2015. One thing that has always been true, no matter how big or small the case, how complicated or simple, is that the same questions pretty much always arise, and they’re the most simple and basic anyone can ask, but between them they usually yield the bulk of the information I require. These are Who, What, Why, Where and When. So this is how I will approach this project.

Who is pretty self-explanatory.

What will refer to the big hit(s)/album(s), the reason I remember the artist and my starting point for checking them out.

When is also self-explanatory, except that it won’t necessarily refer to when the artist began or when the band was formed, but will instead be the year(s) they were most successful

Where will again need no explanation: where do or did they come from?

Why will explain why I’m interested in what happened to them

Case No: THDAMMXXII-VII-IV/01/01

Client: Classified
Casefile:

Who? Timbuk3
What? “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”
Where? America (Madison, WI)
When? 1986
Why? They had, to my knowledge, one hit and then seem to have vanished.

If there’s one place that is very conducive to the life of a private eye, it’s Dublin. Talk about your grey streets being pelted by the slanting, driving rain, turning your collar up and trying to cross the road without being drenched by big trucks and buses splashing through the deep puddles of water. I leave my sixth-floor office - hey, the rent is cheap and they don’t even charge me extra for the roaches I share the place with! - and head down the chipped and broken steps, narrowly avoiding plunging down the stairwell as I step on something which I choose to believe is a dried burrito, ignoring the blank faces that pass me as I descend. Somewhere high above a typewriter cackles as the machine no doubt enjoys the joke that someone here actually believes they can make it as a writer in this town, two mangy dogs barrel past me, looking back as if to ask why I’m on their turf, and the man in room 6 exits with yet another of his many “daughters” clinging with much affection to his arm.

I say I ignore all this, but of course I don’t, as I’ve just described it to you. I am a detective, after all: this is my job. So let’s not use the word ignore. Let’s just say… oh, let’s just say I don’t give a ****. The cold July wind batters me in the face as I push the door in the lobby and more or less fall out into the dark evening. Summer in ****ing Dublin, me arse! I heard it once joked that summer is “not available in ROI”, and I can confirm that. Last year we had a summer - think it was a Saturday, Sunday and half of a Monday. Ah, good times. The rain lashes my face like a million tiny needles and tries to dash out my eyes as I put my head down. On the street, rubes are trying to hold up umbrellas, all of which are either being turned inside out and so resemble big, spiky tulips on metal handles, or are gleefully inflating like parachutes, performing the opposite function, and dragging their owners along the path, dangerously close to the traffic which, despite the heavy rain and the poor conditions, has seen no reason to slow down at all.

Tourists. No Irish person would be so naive.

Mercifully, I don’t have too far to go. A few blocks, as you Americans would say, though here we tend to measure distance properly, the traditional way, so it’s about ten minutes down the road, turn here at the Chinese Takeaway, walk past six pubs and swing a hard right at St. Bernadettes’s and there it is, looming like something out of a Stephen King movie, lurking in the misty rain like a giant spider, my destination, the Hall of Musical Records.

I push in the door and the howling wind is cut off. Furious, it batters at the door but it can’t get in. The central heating wafts over me like, well, like central heating I guess, and the chill recedes a little from my bones. I squelch up to the main desk, nod to the receptionist, show my card (it’s a formality - I’m well known here; but rules are rules) and tramp on up the staircase to the ninth floor, where I spend most of my research. Sure, I could take the elevator, but this place is old. The lift shimmers and shakes like an old man with Parkinson’s, and has been known to just stop midway to a floor. I’ll trust my legs thanks, if it’s all the same to you.

The ninth floor is devoted to the 1980s, and I walk past the various doors from 1981 to 1985, until I get to the one I want. Pushing it open, I survey the walls of tapes, compact discs, VHS videotapes and vinyl albums, and find the one I want. I find a desk, zip open my laptop bag, fire the thing up and get to work.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018