Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F. Ross

Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F. Ross

Author:David F. Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00


11

Contact had been established, and I discovered a higher power’s plan for my life. I’m not religious in any way, but I can accept that there’s something in the notion of a higher power. I’d hit rock bottom, the point where it was either suicide or survive until the next low. I think, despite everything, I was receptive to the idea of something greater than myself, a line shooting around my brain: there must be more to life than this.

Annabelle was gone. Consigned to history. The meekness now merely part of the long game; a manufactured cover story. Anna was the puppet master. Her offer was a one-time deal. Take it or leave it. Leave it, and she’d cut the strings completely, and I’d be a lifeless heap. Nowhere to go but the final checkout. I was in no position to bargain. The meagre royalties from the record, and the previous two, had been accumulating slowly in an account controlled by Anna – the band’s registered financial manager. But now, and for the first time since The Hyptones were on Top of the Pops in the early eighties, that account was about to be seriously boosted.

In explaining the circumstances of the deal, Anna doled out acronyms like she was narrating the index of the Lancet. My brain hurt.

The only one that matters, she said, is PRS.

It stood for Performing Rights Society and had only just been established.

PRS represents its songwriter, composer and music-publisher members’ and collects royalties on their behalf whenever their music is played or performed publicly, she said.

How formal and business-like she sounded. I smirked at the briefest of thoughts: David F. Ross, further screwed by Madonna’s team of aggressive rights managers, as they took an even bigger slice of his da’s legacy.

With a worldwide Apple advertising campaign on the horizon, my song – the one stolen from her dead brother – could accrue multiple thousands of pounds in future plays. She outlined more immediate plans. Following the exposure, the single would be reissued and repackaged. Perhaps as a double pack with the first two singles. An extra remix. A tacky button badge. A video commissioned. Annafuckingbelle, indeed.

But there was something else. Something about her being here now that jarred. I couldn’t put my finger on it. That steel in her gaze. It chilled me more than the sharpening London frost.

After the modest success of our first two singles, Kenny McFadden had persuaded Ronnie Mason to fund a better studio and a proper sound engineer to produce ‘Independent State of Mind’.

The offers’ll be floodin’ in after the States, he’d said. We’ll be beatin’ A&R men off wi’ big bloody sticks.

Kenny acting like a charity-shop Colonel Tom Parker and Ronnie Mason starting to think he’d be the new Don Arden; common sense was in short supply back then. The band was surviving on handouts from Anna, so nobody opposed any suggestion, regardless of how bizarre or ridiculous it seemed. And the constant refrain of ‘Brian would be so proud’ burrowed into my brain to the point where it was all I could hear.



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