All right. I know that I listed the previous post of this story as the final chapter. It was - then. I also thought that it finished in a bit of a rush so here goes with more from Susie and the band. Marianne G

Part 7 The Story Continues

It was deepest winter in England and I was starting to miss the sunny days in Queensland at this time of year. I didn’t miss the cyclones or lashing rain though and snow did seem somewhat peaceful from the inside of a heated house. It is now pretty close to a year and a half since the band broke up and yet it seems like yesterday.

After we had trained Fiona to play the rhythm guitar and Faith had mastered the drums, we had gone back on the road, still as Quimble, but now with three out of five of us being genuine girls. Tess and I were the only ‘girlalikes’ left in the line-up. Although, with Tess the way she looked now, you really could not see the difference these days. After we had played a month at Charlies’ club, he had sold it and had become our road manager full-time. This was very handy as we had been booked to play a number of festivals over last summer across Europe and Felicity had us booked into clubs on some of the weekends we had off.

Tess and Charlie got a tent and camping gear and drove the van we had bought for the equipment while the rest of us made do with public transport, managing to get back to the Manor when we could. While they were travelling Tess and Charlie became a genuine couple and Charlie used some contacts to get her some hormones along the way. By the end of the summer she was developing a serious pair of breasts and was starting to look good, even to me. I, on the other hand, stayed just in the transvestite stage but was starting to lose my own libido. Lesley had got me on a menopause pill that contained plant extracts to help me cope and I must say that it improved my sleep. Before we started the season I had been to a clinic and had some sperm bottled so was sure that we could have another child in future.

Ah! Another child? Yes, Lesley had given birth to little Cate Craven just before Christmas and we loved her to bits. Luckily it did not stop our touring but she did have to do the last few gigs on a stool behind her keyboard. I have told you that we had got paperwork that allowed us to continue working in the EU but I had gone one step further. When I went to Australia I was just a baby and so had dual citizenship. I had come to the UK on an Aussie passport but had changed my name by deed poll to go from Stuart Simpson to Susie Craven. I now applied for a UK passport in that name and showed my name change so now had a UK one with a girl in the picture but still M as the sex. Lesley was OK with her Aussie passport and Tess had still not done anything about hers.

I had kept in touch with my parents and had sent them pictures of us playing, having to point out which one I was after my mother writing back to ask me if I was the one taking the photograph as she couldn’t see me in the band. I think that they were all right with the playacting and I didn’t tell them that I was now Susie 24/7. They were much happier when I sent them a picture of Lesley and Cate after she got home. Tess had also kept in touch with her parents and we had got them to sell our old cars and have a garage sale of the possessions in them and to keep the takings. She had told them about Charlie and I am sure that they were not impressed that the eldest son had turned out queer. Over the summer both Fiona and Faith had short flings with guys from other bands but were now ‘between blokes’. Felicity had taken up with a chap from Cambridge and was going steady.

Now, our summer of festivals gave us a basis to go to another level. Lesley was able to stay with us long enough to record an album before Cate came along and we had released it in the New Year and it was selling well. Funnily enough, a couple of the songs that Fiona and Faith had written were commercial enough to get general airplay and we were steadily climbing the charts. Even the songs that Tess and I sang came across as being a girls voice. We did not play much cover stuff as we had a good catalogue of our own these days and we did not even play the early songs that Bruce had written any more.

Felicity had already locked us in for a series of festivals and other gigs over the coming summer so we were able to look at our future with confidence. The day things got skewed was the day she told us that our album and singles had been released in Australia and New Zealand and were doing very well, so well that they had re-released our first album as well. It was March when my mother wrote to angrily ask if I was writing bull-shit to her as she had just read a new book on the market about the band and, if I was doing half of what was written, I was no son of hers.

I had no idea what she was talking about but the answer came in the post just a couple of days later. It was a parcel from Bruce that had the book in question as well as a CD. In the letter he said that he was now sorry he had gone back to Australia as he didn’t realise just how much he enjoyed being Brianna. He was now living in Sydney and was Brianna full-time and playing guitar in a Goth girl band called Spittool. He said they did his Quimble songs as well as covering some of our later stuff and that, since the book came out, he had become a minor celebrity at The Cross. The CD was a recording of them and when I played it to Lesley we decided that we must sound good as these covers sounded good.

The book, however, was another thing altogether. Steve had left the UK as an angry young man who had been taken to his extremes having to play as a girl. The fact that he had never worn a skirt or a dress did not matter to him; it was his having to wear jewellery and make-up that left a mark on his psyche. He had opened up to Adrian, the could-have-been who had got us the gig in the UK in the first place. I am sure that Adrian was still mad at Lesley for tossing him to become my partner. I gather that he had a friend who was a budding author as the drivel in the book was never Steves’ own words. The photos were good, though, and showed us in OZ when we toured as well as some pictures of us in the UK, even some of us when we were not on the stage but still were wearing dresses as we looked around the tourist spots.

The book was called ‘I Was a Quasi-Queer Drummer in Quimble’ and was supposed to be an expose of our tour. However, there was a lot of queer sex by everyone and Lesley was purported to be a lesbian dominatrix while I was a put-upon slave to her evil desires. It had heaps to say about poor Tess and Charlie, describing unbelievable goings-on under the stage as well as drunken parties with gangs of queers. Brianna came out best as just being a simple soul who had sold herself to the devil to just get through before gallantly casting off the shackles of femininity to escape. I wondered if we had grounds to sue or whether the case would never have a good hearing as we had, actually, dressed as women for the tour and the photos backed that up. Funnily enough, there was nothing in the book about his own times when he was shacked up with Faith but Felicity came across as a bossy woman who made us do things that no self-respecting male should do. His Lordship became an evil wizard who cast spells over everyone for his own good.

After all of the others had read it we had a meeting where we decided that it was too hard to fight it with us here and him there. Lesley was doubly angry at Adrian as she had told me that she had written him a nice letter to tell him she wasn’t coming back but had not called him any names, even though she wanted to. Tess was in tears after she had read it and vowed to stomp Steve with her high heels if she ever saw him again. Charlie said that it was unlikely to see light of day in Europe as it was printed by a small publisher in Brisbane so we would not have to worry about it being a problem for our future gigs. His Lordship took the book and, after reading it, had a jolly good laugh and promptly sent it to his legal friend to see if we could put out an injunction.

When I played Briannas’ band CD we all thought that he was still good but needed to start writing more of his own songs. After that meeting we all put the book on the ‘too stupid to worry about’ pile and I wrote back to my mother to tell her that most of it was made up for effect and that my letters gave a more truthful account. I did, however, confirm that I was living as Susie full-time and was now supposed to be sisters with Lesley. I included another picture of Cate for her to frame and said I hoped that one day she could meet her grand-daughter.

In April we started the summer of touring. Felicity looked after Cate while we were away and Tess took to the road with Charlie again. We started in Whitby at the twice a year festival and then left for the South of France again and worked our way north At the end of May we played at the Wave Gotik Treffen which was one of the wildest shows I had ever seen. In mid-June one of our songs hit the top ten in the general pop charts and we were being touted as a ‘breath of fresh Goth air’ by the music papers. Faith and Fiona, along with Lesley, were busy writing new material which we trialled on stage before thinking about recording them and we built up a repertoire that was almost twice as much as we needed for a stage show, allowing us to mix things up if we played more than one show in any one place.

In July we had a call from Felicity to tell us that we were wanted for a tour of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan over the southern summer, our records doing so well we needed to show ourselves on stage. It would start in Cape Town in the middle of November, going to Johannesburg and Durban before going to Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane for Christmas before heading to Auckland in mid-January with the last show being in Christchurch before transiting through Australia to Tokyo and coming home via Hong Cong. The money offered was very good and, after some discussion, we told her to go for it.

Marianne G 2020