The Fall of the Fainthearts

Track Two: Old Flames

Dahlia: That night nobody would even sit next to Axel in the taxi on the way home. Instead, we decided we'd all rather pile into the back seat and spend the whole journey elbow to elbow with barely enough room to breathe. Nobody could stand the sight of him.

Axel: It's fair to say I probably did fuck up. In their eyes, anyway. I'm still not convinced.

Bentley: In five minutes he had single-handedly wrecked the past five years of hours and hours of practice and patience. Of course we weren't going to be all buddy-buddy with him. The way we practically begged his dad on our knees for one chance, for that to get destroyed because he couldn't write a decent song to save his life and now he does this. His dad always was a complete ass wipe and all I could think was that it runs in the family.

Axel: It took the whole ride back to the hotel but I did apologise eventually. I was coming down and it kind of hit me, everything that had happened that night. I just sat there with my head in my hands, worrying over it until I finally broke. Bit embarrassing, really.

Vince: The guy cried like a baby. And it worked. On some of us, at least.

Bentley: I did feel sorry for the guy. I mean, what else was we supposed to do other than forgive him? We couldn't just be mad at him forever, then the band would have no chance. What's done was done. We just had to accept that Kian Cash wasn't going to be the producer for us. But, man, it sucked.

Dahlia: I saw right through him, I wasn't falling for the façade. I knew he could barely remember what had happened, let alone feel remorseful about it. As soon as I could I left the taxi, slammed the door back on them and locked the lot of 'em out of the hotel room. I just needed to be alone for a change; I felt drained.

Axel: Me and the boys just sat on a curb at the side of the car park the whole night and watched the sun come up. We tried the hotel door but we didn't have a spare key and Dahlia wasn't really in the mood to let us in.

It's one of them nights that I'll never forget because when I look back I'm in awe of what I didn't know back then. We had no idea what was right around the corner for us, whether we would ever even bother to play our music again. Honestly, we could've very easily just split that night and called it quits, gone back to normal life, what ever that meant for us.

And if we did that, I would've probably ended up back with Figgy.

Figgy Taylor was romantically involved with Axel between 1989 to 1991. She claims that this is the first time that she has ever been officially interviewed.

Figgy: Our relationship was fantastic, don't let him tell you otherwise. It's always mistaken for this messy, abusive drug-infused fantasy but it wasn't anything like that. I'm tired of always being painted as this freak when in reality I just needed help, exactly like he did. Why does he get the benefit of the doubt all the time when he was throwing himself about on stage for years like a total junkie? It's because the world loves him, and it doesn't love me.

We met in college. It was a very prestigious school, not the sort that you can just waltz straight into. We both came from richer backgrounds, you see, so it was nothing to do with our capabilities. Isabelle and Tim Faintheart knew my parents quite closely, my dad was quite into music so they had a lot in common. From the second we met, me and Axel just seemed to hit it off.

Axel: We were very bored, needed to find ways to pass the time and I guess that's how it started. We had the money, we had the time and the drugs were on every corner, at every party. It was just how it was, back then.

Figgy: Every evening after class I'd sneak into the boy's dorms and spend the whole night with him, talking about everything and nothing. We'd smoke, pop pills, do anything that was kicking around at the time, to be honest. What ever we could get our hands on that night would do the trick.