Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1. The Berlin Airlift
2. Billy Moon
3. Zoot Suit and the Zeroids
4. Ridiculous and Jones
5. She Cracked
6. Skrewdriver
7. Bob Sleigh and the Crestas
8. House on Fire
9. Various Artists
10. The Shirehorses
About the Author
Mark Radcliffe was born in Bolton, and attended Manchester university. He is currently employed by the BBC to talk between records on Radio 1. He is married, has one daughter, lives in Cheshire, supports Manchester City F.C and drinks in the George and Dragon.
SHOWBUSINESS
Diary of a Rock’n’Roll Nobody
Mark Radcliffe
www.hodder.co.uk
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works: ‘Ghost Town’ by Jerry Dammers © 1981 Plangent Visions Music Limited
Get It On’ by Marc Bolan © 1971 Westminster Music Ltd of Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Rd, London SW10 0SZ. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 1998 Mark Radcliffe
The right of Mark Radcliffe to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781444755565
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For B and H and the ghost of Jimmy L
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my mum and dad who bought me the drums and put up with the noise for years, as did Jaine and Joe. Thanks to Matthew and Andy for the day job and Jeanne and Ian at East West for helping to take the joke too far. Thanks to Angela at Hodder who believed a disc jockey could construct a sentence. Thanks to everyone in the bands, especially Phil and Marc. Finally thanks to Bella for love, support and, not least, typing.
1
The Berlin Airlift
It’s an addiction. Simple as that. For most of my adolescent and adult life I’ve had to accept its hold over me. There have been times when I’ve tried to fight it, but resistance is futile. It’s an addiction and that’s all there is to it.
Most kids have at least a vague idea of what they want to do when they grow up. My idea was anything but vague: I wanted to be in a band. I’ve been in so many bands for so much of my life that it’s hard to say how it all began. I can remember as a little kid being very keen on a television programme called The White Heather Club, which was a weekly showcase of Scottish music. So great was my enthusiasm for imitating the jigs and reels that my mum ran me up a kilt out of an old travelling rug. Donning it religiously five minutes before Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor and the rest of the White Heather regulars came on became a familiar ritual, and I’ve come to look on this as an early expression of the desire to become a musical performer. At least, it doesn’t appear to have been an early expression of the desire to become Scottish.
It was at my grandma and grandad’s house in Farnworth that I became a drummer. Every Sunday afternoon, after the remains of the cold brisket, onions in vinegar and sherry trifle had been put back in the pantry, my grandad would turn on the radiogramme to make sure the valves were warmed up in time for Pick of the Pops presented by Alan Freeman. Meanwhile, I would run round the house snatching various appliances and small pieces of furniture with which to construct a makeshift drum-kit: a suedette pouffe for a bass drum, a pan lid for a cymbal, a washing-up bowl in lieu of a snare. Suitably prepared, I would then spend a blissful hour clattering the aged household effects with splintering knitting needles while the rest of the family drew closer to the telly in order to hear Songs of Praise above the smash-and-grab swoop on an ironmonger’s that was taking place in the front parlour. Eventually my mum and dad bought me a couple of real drums, probably on the assumption that it was a cheaper option than constantly replacing grandma’s ovenware, and once I had the drums I had to have the band. And that’s how it all started. I’ve been in dodgy bands with dodgy names ever since, and the first of these was the Berlin Airlift.
I was fourteen at the time and in daily attendance at the imposing sandstone establishment known as Bolton School, an admirably christened institution, being, as it was, a school in Bolton. Under the occasionally watchful eye of Mr Derbyshire we were tracing the course of the Second World War, and the name of the band was taken from the index of a history textbook, having been selected from a shortlist that also included Polish Corridor, Warsaw Pact, Scapa Flow and the Warmington-on-Sea Home Guard. The latter was suggested as a joke at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight and the eventual realisation that we were a bunch of rank amateurs with no chance of achieving anything, it now looks by far the most appropriate. Another short-lived contender was Derbyshire Is a Git. Despite being a bewitching name for a beat combo, however, it didn’t really count, because it hadn’t actually been printed in the index but scrawled there by Carl Walters, and as Mr Derbyshire was not only our housemaster but also the bloke who booked the bands for the school disco, we quickly dismissed that option, tempting though it was. Take it from me, you’ll never get anywhere in showbusiness if you insult the promoter. Your chances of playing Wembley will be severely dented if you insist on calling yourselves Short-Arse ’Arvey Goldsmith and the Little Fat Bearded Bastards.
The members of the Berlin Airlift are now, of course, the stuff of rock legend and Pete Frame Family Tree. For those unfamiliar with the full epic saga, and I can’t think there are many, I can only point you in the direction of Albert Goldman’s incisive critique, From Bolton School to the Budokhan – Berlin Airlift: The Wonder Years. The list of former Airlifters who went on to become musicians of international repute is too long and fictitious to print here, but if I were to mention names like Jeff ‘Carry’ Carrington, Mark ‘Stocky’ Sayers and Michael ‘Doris’ Lipsey you’ll understand the calibre of artist we’re dealing with.
Undoubtedly, though, the true Airlift aficionado will always hark back to the original line-up, the seminal four-piece whose blend of glam and metal sent reverberations not only through my sister’s bedroom but out on to Carlton Road if she had the window open. So who were these four kick-botty horsemen of the rock’n’roll apocalypse, meticulously honing an act that would one day take them all the way to Bolton Lad’s Club at the bottom of Chorley New Road? Well, for starters, there was me on drums and lead vocals.
Many people find the concept of singing drummers an odd one, but you have to remember that archangel Peter Gabriel was still the front man with Genesis at this time. This kept the Artful Codger Phil ‘Buster’ Collins in his rightful place behind the kit, so no one really knew how deeply unpleasant the phenomenon of the vocalising tub-thumper would prove to be. It’s also been suggested that it’s no
t exactly a riveting visual feast for the audience if the lead singer is hidden behind what looks like the contents of a small hardware emporium. I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing – have you seen Simple Minds? Personally I think it’s infinitely preferable to have a vocalist who’s pretty much invisible rather than some podgy ponce in a girlie blouse prancing up and down the stage shouting ‘Woooah . . . do you feel all right . . . let me see some hands.’
So there was me on drums and vocals, and on a good day I would assess my musical ability, out of a possible ten, as two.
Then there was Jerry Lumley on guitar. Jerry was a rocker in the Leslie West, Screaming Trees, Tad and Meatloaf mould. He was fat. In a school riddled with zit-infested budding pop stars, Jerry Lumley looked the least likely ever to walk on stage to be greeted by a thousand adolescent screams and a barrage of moist pubescent underwear. He had one major advantage over the rest of us, though: he could actually play. He could play T Rex tunes and Bowie tunes and Beatles tunes; he could even play the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata on the piano, although sadly it never figured in our blistering live set. Had we gone in more of a progressive rock direction, we would no doubt have had a pseudo-classical interlude in the middle of our epic anthem to teen angst, ‘I can’t go to Yates’s ’cos I’ve not been paid for my paper round’. At a given point, probably a smoke bomb, the blimp-like Lumley would put down his guitar, stride majestically to the piano, toss his Lurex cape back and hammer out a few bars of ‘Moonlight’ gubbins before launching into his own baroque composition, ‘Night Dance of the Fire Pixies’. Alas, he never got the chance. And the title had probably been used by Rush anyway.
So there was me on drums and vocals, musical ability out of ten, on a good day: two; Jerry Lumley on guitar, musical ability: five or even six; and there was another guitarist by the name of Guy Farringdon. At this stage in our lives you have to remember that the word ‘guitarist’ meant someone who owned a guitar and not necessarily someone who could play it. With a wicked bit of schoolboy irony we dubbed him Eric, after Eric Clapton, so it’s now doubly ironic that as head of his family food empire Guy Farringdon appeared above Eric Clapton in the Sunday Times league table of the UK’s two hundred richest men.
As you can imagine, given his background, Guy (or Eric) wasn’t short of a bob or two, but he was in the band for two reasons. First, he had a Watkins Rapier. Now, if you’re thinking that this is a typical bit of rich-kid lunacy, owning a car before legally being able to drive, then you’re getting confused with the Sunbeam Rapier. The Watkins Rapier 44 was, and I’ll pause here for a gasp of incredulity . . . an electric guitar – something we’d only ever seen on television or by pressing our noses against shop windows, and we saw a lot more of them when we started pressing our noses against music-shop windows and moved on from the butcher’s. They’ve stopped making Watkins guitars now, so they’ve become highly sought-after collectors’ items, which means that they still sound bloody awful but the price has gone up a lot.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Guy (or Eric) couldn’t play the guitar at all – he could strum chords with no less ineptitude than most of us – but he was nowhere near as good as Jerry Lumley. This presented no initial problem as it was always accepted that Jez would be the free-flowing lead axe hero of the organisation with Guy clanking in on rhythm when he was 80 to 90 per cent sure he’d got his fingers in the right places. However, there was a flaw in this arrangement that only became apparent during rehearsals for our glamorous début booking. The dextrous Lumley had only an acoustic guitar, an Eko Ranger 6 for all you trainspotters out there, while the ham-fisted Farringdon had not only the coveted Watkins but also a tinnitus-inducing Vox AC30 amplifier. Flash git. The average Airlift number consequently consisted of Jerry and I starting more or less together and making a reasonable job of the first line before being completely drowned out as our esteemed rhythm ace decided to risk a howitzer chord. The chorus of Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’, for instance, would take the form:
So cum on feel the . . . KERRAAANGG-G-G
Girls grab the KERCHUUUNGG-G-G.
Soon realising that this was going to get pretty tiresome for those unfortunate enough to have been press-ganged into the audience, Jerry tentatively suggested an exchange of instruments, just for the forthcoming appearance naturally. Guy (Eric) was less than tentative in telling Jez to stuff his Eko Ranger up his arse. Which, for a lad of Jez’s build, was by no means an impossibility.
The second reason that Guy Farringdon (Eric Clapton) was enlisted was to bring some much-needed sex appeal to the ranks. These days he looks every inch the dapper captain of industry, but back then he had tousled white beach-bum locks, in contrast to Jerry Lumley, who had a bum the size of a beach. He also had a luscious peaches-and-cream complexion, in contrast to me, who had a fruit-salad complexion necessitating Clearasil on draught. This made him something of a heart-throb to our school’s lower-sixth-form pupils. It was even rumoured that girls fancied him as well. In fact, he and I later risked the whole existence of the band as we competed for the attentions of Pippa Johnson. Initially the flaxen-haired strum-meister won out, only for her to realise that money, good looks and charm aren’t everything, and you’re often better off with a weedy, penniless drummer with a pudding-basin fringe concealing a forehead full of acne. In the end she moved down south and became with child to a bloke who worked for Siemens.
To recap, then, I was on drums and vocals, musical ability: two; there was Jerry Lumley on increasingly inaudible lead guitar, musical ability: five or even six; there was Guy Farringdon on ear-drum-threatening rhythm guitar and pout, musical ability: one; and there was Davey Bright. Davey Bright could fix things with a soldering iron and so seemed eminently well qualified to be the roadie. Why, then, we gave him the bass player’s job I’ll never know. The fact that he couldn’t play bass at all wasn’t immediately apparent as he didn’t own one. To be fair to him, I don’t recall him ever claiming he could play. In retrospect I think we may have forced him into it, approaching, as we were, a prestigious concert recital under the misapprehension that the classic four-piece line-up is: vocals, drums, guitar, bass. It isn’t. When starting a band you should remember that the classic four-piece line-up is: vocals, drums, guitar, van driver. You can be the finest undiscovered band in the universe, but you’re liable to stay that way for a very long time if you can’t get your gear to the gig.
Practically talentless and emphatically vanless, the full line-up was in place: me on drums and vocals, musical ability: two; Jerry Lumley on adept but inaudible guitar, musical ability: five or even six; Guy Farringdon on inept and noisy guitar, musical ability: one; and Davey Bright on soldering iron and a bass that was still in the shop, musical ability: zero. How could we fail?
‘Good evening, Lostock Tennis Club – are you ready to rock?’
The pavilion of Lostock Tennis Club was a shed on stilts where posh kids and their parents drank Pimm’s after another rubber or whatever they call it. As the world’s dullest and most pointless game apart from golf, the ins and outs of tennis need not detain us here. It’s the rock heritage of the Lostock Clubhouse that’s important. We were booked to play by some posh kid’s dad who was the social secretary. Looking back on it, this could be viewed as an act of great philanthropy, giving four struggling young lads a chance to show what they could do, even if it wasn’t much. In reality I think it’s more likely that he was pissed when Guy asked him.
Like the Beatles at the Cavern, the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club or Roger Whitaker at the Tameside Theatre, Ashton-under-Lyne, if everyone who now claims to have been at Lostock Tennis Club that night actually had been there we’d have filled the Albert Hall. Not the Royal Albert Hall down south, the Albert Hall in Bolton, where we would later witness such greats as Trapeze, Judas Priest and the Dawn Dawson Academy of Song and Dance’s ‘Young Stars of Tomorrow’.
We arrived at the club around lunch-time. At least, three of us did. Jerry and I took the drums and the Eko
Ranger with us on the bus, while Davey somehow managed to get his newly purchased bass, his amplifier and his soldering kit there on his bike. The maestro Eric had warned us he couldn’t make it till around two-thirty. I forget what he was doing, but I suspect it was one of those peculiar pastimes that only the children of the wealthy seem to indulge in and which remain utterly mystifying to the rest of us. Things like elocution and deportment lessons and rugby sevens.
He duly arrived on the dot of an hour and a half later than he’d promised, bounding into the room, Watkins in hand, leaving his arthritic mother to haul the AC30 from the boot of the Jaguar and up the rickety wooden staircase that was in itself a part of rock’n’roll history. It has been widely rumoured that the working title for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was in fact ‘Stairway to Lostock Tennis Club’, but I’ve been unable to verify this with Jimmy Page or Robert Plant at time of going to press. How these people get where they are without returning phone calls is beyond me.
The first thing that would have struck Guy on his belated arrival in the clubhouse that day was the size of my newly embellished drum-kit. Well, that’s not strictly true. The first thing to strike him would have been Jerry Lumley’s fist, had not the bar steward intervened with a placatory ‘Now, now, lads’ and the promise of free halves of Watney’s dark mild when the pumps were turned on. Nevertheless, my battery of percussion was impressive, to say the least – and preposterous, to say the most. For the last few years my mum and dad had been buying me a drum every Christmas and birthday, so I had pretty much a full kit by the time the gig arrived. Ever restless, though, I decided the set-up looked a little on the tentative side, so I went up to Barry Halpern’s place to borrow a few extra tom-toms.
Barry Halpern was a school friend of mine who had a big penis. This is not some frank confession of an adolescent homosexual liaison, it was just that everyone knew he had a big penis because he always had it out in class. And I think if I’d had one of comparable size I’d have been as keen to show it off as he was. On one memorable occasion during physics, Mr McCarroll spotted the affable Halpern fiddling with something under the desk. Not knowing what sort of monster was lurking down there, the exasperated and long-suffering McCarroll ejaculated, ‘Halpern, whatever you’re messing with, bring it out here to me.’ That Barry Halpern cheerfully obliged cemented his place in our hearts for ever, and the hours spent moulding and toying with his hot and malleable lump proved, in later life, to be time well spent, as he became a blacksmith.