Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Read online

  Under our encouragement, Garth agreed to sing his Tom Jones medley, and with Ian on drums, Wammo on guitar and, inadvisably, me on bass, he bounded on stage with a silk shirt knotted across his bouncy-castle belly to launch into ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’, while wiggling his crotch at the beehived matriarchs who were waiting for the raffle to be drawn. It was not received with the greatest of enthusiasm.

  It had all gone wrong. We’d hooked up with Al, Seth and Garth as anarcho-punk, or, if you prefer, talentless cabaret artists, in the hope that their musicianship and fame would change our lives. Within a few short months it had worked the other way round. The raw promise of She Cracked had given way to the cartoon capers of Ridiculous and Jones. Once Seth and Alan recognised that, they dropped us like a stone, and I can’t say that I blame them. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we were us, we’d have dropped us, too.

  6

  Skrewdriver

  In the summer following the collapse of She Cracked, I continued to live in the flat on Booth Avenue I’d been sharing with Wammo and a town-planning student from Southampton called Gerry Kitchen. Initially, Phil and I shared one bedroom, which worked out fine most of the time, but, as my cohabitee observed, would be ‘pretty awkward if we got a couple of chicks back here’. Thankfully, the situation never arose. Had he managed to lure some impressionable fresh-faced theologist back to his crusty nylon-sheeted lair, I’d have been faced with the options of vacating my bed or lying awake catching glimpses of his spotty white posterior waxing and waning in the milky moonlight, and a night on the streets was preferable to that.

  Before we’d moved in, we had made a point of asking the landlord if the flat was damp, to which he replied firmly in the negative. In the literal sense he was right, as ‘damp’ was no way to describe the prevailing conditions in that bedroom. A better description would be soaking wet. Thankfully, there was a two-bar electric fire in the hearth which featured an undulating sheet of heat-resistant plastic inexpertly daubed with black paint to resemble no fossil fuel yet successfully mined, but which was nevertheless proudly listed in the inventory as ‘coal effect’. Phil’s fetid futon was located much nearer than mine to this pathetically inadequate heat source, so if he braved the elements and retired to bed first, he used the room’s solitary plug socket to fire it up and, over the course of an hour or so, bring the temperature of his bed to above freezing point. The sheets were still damp, of course, but at least your flesh didn’t stick to the pillow as you slid in. If I plucked up the courage to put on my mittens and enter our bedroom first, and, believe you me, Sir Ranulph Fiennes would have blanched at it, then I commandeered the socket to operate my electric blanket. When selecting somewhere to lay your weary head, places where running water and mains electricity meet are probably best avoided, and there’s every possibility that my bed was a potential death-trap. However, being fried alive seemed a risk worth taking just for the sheer enjoyment of watching Wammo brace himself for the shock to the nervous system that contact with his unheated sheets would inevitably bring. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that two blokes enjoying the benefit of a university education could spend a year sharing a single-plug socket without either considering investing in a double adaptor.

  Gerry, despite paying only an equal third of the £12 weekly rent, had a room of his own. This was partly due to the fact that he needed more space for his technical-drawing equipment and also because he didn’t share our enthusiasm for jumping up in the morning and farting in each other’s face. The most notable things about Gerry were his centre parting, evidently the result of laser surgery such was its depth and accuracy, and his blind devotion to Southampton Football Club. He wasn’t gay, he had a girlfriend called Karen Crotty, but if Mick Shannon had tantalisingly lowered his Y-fronts in the privacy of that moist brown-carpeted cell, I think he’d have discovered reserves of latent homosexuality he’d little suspected of being there. Despite being a genial and long-suffering sort of bloke, Gerry moved out relatively quickly, which put the rent up to a crippling six quid a week each. Admittedly, I gleefully contributed to his domestic discomfort, but I still maintain that it was not me who pushed him over the edge. I never tried to deny that it was me who nailed Karen’s knickers to the ceiling or left a portion of macaroni cheese in his Southampton bobble hat. I hold my hands up and accept that Wammo and I were accomplices in the great emulsion paint scandal. This involved a pool of eggshell white being silently laid at the door of Gerry’s room, after which a mock fight took place at high volume in the hallway. Understandably keen to see their flatmates suffer a violent beating, the young lovers scampered out to investigate, and in their speed and eagerness left a trail of ghostly footprints on the Wilton shagged pile. These things I concede, but I ask you, who was it who parted his bare buttocks and broke wind over Gerry’s chicken and mushroom pie and chips during Match of the Day? Well, I’m not mentioning any names, but his initials are Phil Walmsley.

  When Phil went home for the summer to continue his active role in the shameful conspiracy to defraud old people of their pensions in return for deformed glass-blown novelties, I opted to stay on to experiment in a little fledgling cohabitation with a blonde biochemistry drop-out from Bingley. I was also loath to leave the elaborate fungus formations we’d nurtured by meticulous daily irrigation of the kitchen wall. Settling in for a splendid summer of snogging, signing on and cider, I had the next few months mapped out until the day the telegram arrived. Hammering on the peeling door at the crack of noon, the postman thrust the envelope marked ‘Urgent’ into my hand before stomping off, muttering ‘Bloody students’ very nearly under his stagnant pond-water breath. Tearing it open, I read the stark message within: ‘Phone Phil urgently. That means now, dickhead.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I blurted, ‘what the hell’s happened? Perhaps one of his relatives has died, or maybe he’s inadvertently sucked instead of blown and has got a molten mutant swan in his lungs.’

  Stabbing ten pence into the slot, I could feel my voice quivering as I spoke:

  ‘Oh, h-h-hello, M-Mrs Walmsley, I – is your Wammo there?’

  ‘Hello, Mark. Are you all right? Are you shivering? It’s not natural to be cold in July. Especially now you’ve got sole use of the plug socket. Now hold on and I’ll get Philip for you.’

  ‘Well, she doesn’t sound like there’s been a family bereavement,’ I thought as I waited for Phil to come to the phone. ‘Bloody hell, sodding pips are going and I’ll have to put another ten pence in now. That’s the price of a pint of mild I’ve wasted already. He’d better not be having a dump or I’ll have stuck a week’s dole down the bleeding thing before he’s said a word.’

  There was an agitated clatter at the other end.

  ‘Sparky, is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me, you pillock – what’s wrong?’

  ‘Listen, I’ve been playing in this punk band with my old mates from Warlock and we’ve got a gig, but the drummer’s a wanker. Will you do it?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course I will, but why the telegram? When is this gig?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘What day is it today?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Christ almighty. Right, I’ll get the train in the morning and ring you from the station. Oh, by the way, where is this gig, then?’

  ‘It’s at a festival in Groningen, which is in the north of Holland.’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll get up early, around elevenish, and I’ll phone you . . . Hang on a minute, did you say Holland? Run that by me again.’

  ‘It’s a punk festival and it’s in . . . beep beep beep . . . tomorrow . . . brrrrrrr.’ With that the line went dead, and I certainly wasn’t going to waste the price of a portion of chips phoning him back, but did he say Holland? On Saturday? Surely not.

  The journey to Phil’s in Poulton was as uneventful as taking a full drum-kit on a train packed with grumpy pensioners heading for Blackpool can be. The occasional obstreperous octogenarian evidently consider
ed it inappropriate that a floor tom-tom should occupy a window-seat while elderly gentlemen with walking-sticks had to stand as far as Preston, but what could I do? I’d gallantly given up my own seat to a heavily pregnant fat lass from Widnes, and there was simply nowhere else I could put the drums, although one old-timer did have a suggestion that I informed him would prove difficult without a catering pack of Stork margarine and a good deal of discomfort. It was, then, with some joy and relief that I arrived at Poulton-le-Fylde, and there can’t be many people who’ve said that.

  Phil was waiting on the platform in a state of great agitation, sporting a pair of flared hipsters requiring immediate alteration. Hurrying me into the idling Austin 1100, he filled me in on the battle plan: ‘Yeah, so me and Des and Les have got this gig in Holland through a dodgy agent from Fleetwood, but the last time we went out with the drummer Chinny he fell asleep on a toilet floor after a particularly exhausting bout of diarrhoea, and we can’t bear the thought of four days in a van with an incontinent psychopathic skinhead.’ Well, you could see his point.

  He drove me to the tiny council house that Les Bartlett shared with his gran. In all the time I knew Les, I only ever saw him in the clothes he wore that day: a black leather waistcoat, half-mast Levis and a pair of size-twelve combat boots liberally splattered in the plaster that indicated he wasn’t first and foremost a guitarist. He was a friendly sort of bloke with an ever-present grin, which could, however, appear moderately threatening if he’d forgotten to put his false front teeth in. Les’s bedroom contained, quite reasonably, a bed, along with two Marshall cabinets, a sunburst Les Paul, his collection of unwashed milk bottles bearing the stamps of various assorted dairies, the cannabis plants his gran lovingly watered daily safe in the knowledge that her grandson was cultivating a forest of miniature conker trees, and Des Richards. Des had a rasping voice that was as pleasant to listen to as fingernails being scraped down a blackboard, so naturally he was the singer. He was wearing red drain-pipes, a Grenadier Guards jacket, the hairstyle of a startled spiny ant-eater and the snarling expression of an assistant behind a post office counter.

  At this point I had better come clean and admit that in later life Des became a prime mover in the National Front, and with a completely different line-up played many fascist rallies under the same group name. During the weeks I spent in his company, he was actually charm personified and never once expressed any bigoted views whatsoever. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not defending the odious extremism he later adopted, it’s just that there was no sign of it at this point. The name Skrewdriver is now synonymous with ultra-right-wing supremacist dogma, and that’s a sad betrayal of the ideals and efforts of everyone else involved with the band in those early days. You’ll just have to trust that if I (or Phil or Les) had had any inkling of the racist philosophies that came to dominate Des’s thinking, then we’d have been off like a shot.

  Des informed us that he’d been trying to book a local church hall for us to rehearse in, and while he’d been able to make a reservation for Friday, that Thursday evening was out because of the over-fifties badminton session. Did this sort of thing stand in the way of the Clash I wondered. It was also at this meeting that I was informed that my battle-scarred Olympic kit was surplus to requirements, as I would be using Chinny’s much-admired Slingerland.

  ‘Well, why the bleeding hell didn’t you tell me that before I humped it on to the train, incurring the wrath of several psychotic coffin dodgers, who beat me savagely round the head with colostomy bags?’ I enquired calmly.

  Phil went red, which, in truth, for a man of his pigmentation was hardly a transformation of chameleonic proportions. ‘Hmmm . . . aaah . . . yes . . . well . . . y’see . . . sorry, our kid.’

  ‘And anyway, I thought this Chinny was a grade A nutter. How come he’s lent you his prized Slingerland kit when he’s not even in the band any more?’

  ‘Hmmm . . . aaah . . . yes . . . well . . . y’see . . . we haven’t actually told him he’s not in the band any more.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. You don’t tell him about the gig, you just use his drums, which he’s left in the rehearsal room, and steal them away to Holland.’

  ‘Hmmm . . . aaah . . . yes . . . well . . . y’see . . . his drums aren’t exactly in the rehearsal room as such.’

  ‘So where are they, then?’

  ‘In the shed.’

  ‘Which shed?’

  ‘The one behind his house.’

  ‘So how are we going to get them, then?’

  ‘Hmmm . . . aaah . . . yes . . . well . . . y’see . . . if Des keeps him talking at the front door, then you and me and Les can nip into the shed and chuck the drums over the back fence.’

  ‘Right. Isn’t there just one small flaw in this otherwise cunning plan?’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Chinny, from the little I know of him, is a pea-brained sadistic giant who, if he hears his beloved Slingerland being hurled over the garden wall, will rush round and beat the living daylights out of us.’

  ‘Hmmm . . . aaah . . . yes . . . well . . . ’

  As it happened, the dreaded Chinny was out when we went round. His bespectacled, white-haired father said he’d gone to night school, which seemed extraordinarily unlikely unless the local technical college had introduced a course in adult toilet-training. Removing the Slingerland proved relatively straightforward under the circumstances, and all that remained was to learn all the songs and nip into Blackpool for Phil to buy a bass guitar, which, despite the fact that he was playing bass in the band, it had thus far slipped his mind to do. Still, it was only Thursday evening, and we wouldn’t need to leave for Holland until two o’clock the following afternoon. No sweat.

  Rehearsals for our début European jaunt went favourably. Les Bartlett made more noise than any guitarist I’d ever heard, obliterating the vocals entirely, which, as any member of our eventual audience would confirm, was a blessing and no mistake. Phil, despite learning the bass lines as he went along, managed to nod, shrug his shoulders and thrust his headstock in a kind of idiot semaphore to communicate the basic structure of the tunes to the rookie drummer. We ran once through the entire set, which must have consisted of ten songs or so with an average running time of one minute and fifty seconds each. On to some of these we tagged a cacophonous crescendo ending a` la Lynyrd Skynyrd, which nudged them over two minutes. This meant that our total performance time was running somewhere around twenty minutes, although this didn’t allow for Des’s witty and inspired banter, which on a good night, so Phil told me, could add a further ninety seconds. Having absorbed the rudiments of the material, and, to be honest, the rudiments were often all there was, we went back to the first song to polish the finer points, such as starting and finishing together. I have no idea what the song was called, because at no point during rehearsal or gig did I hear one word of the lyrics. I simply listened to Les’s guitar roar and took each twitch of Phil’s razored blond bonce as a cue to stop or start. It sounded great from where I was. After a couple more run-throughs, that first number was sounding fairly plausible, and if we systematically worked through the remainder of the set we’d be in grave danger of appearing competent. Unfortunately, we never got the chance as at that moment the van arrived to take us to the ferry port at Sheerness. Ah well, at least we had one tune we knew people would like, which may not sound a lot, but it’s one more than the Spin Doctors.

  The ferry crossing was spent drinking Southern Comfort in the bar, apart from a brief excursion to the cafeteria, where sausage, beans and chips accounted for the equivalent of a week’s rent. However, it was money well spent as Wammo had strongly advised lining the stomach before an extended bout of seaborne drinking, advice I greatly appreciated when losing the residue of that grease-ridden platter over the side forty minutes later. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I remarked, returning to the Salty Seadog Saloon wiping overpriced slurry from my lips, ‘that cost me about a quid a heave.’

  Our host for this intrepid exp
edition was an agent by the name of Jimmy Quimby. He had blond hair cut into that peculiar pudding-basin hairstyle favoured by middle-aged businessmen and football club chairmen called Francis Lee. His candy-pink Bri-nylon leisure shirt, undersized and overpressed grey slacks, and white wet-look loafers made him look as thoroughly disreputable as someone wearing sandwich boards reading ‘I am thoroughly disreputable’. He talked twenty to the dozen, or perhaps even twenty-four, and snatching a few minutes of delirious sleep in the bar that night proved impossible, as no sooner had you slumped open-mouthed and spittle-chinned on a velour couchette than you would be woken with a start by the clatter of Jimmy Quimby dropping another name:

  ‘Yes, well, of course, when I did this trip with the Stones you couldn’t move for chicks . . . Groningen, yes, I remember it from the early seventies when I came with Elton . . . of course, my wife’s a great singer and I’ve just done a deal with Clapton to play on her next record.’

  Well, I knew Clapton had had some years detached from reality in a drug-addled stupor, but it seemed unlikely things had got as bad as that.

  It was left to the grim-faced Des to forcefully pose the question that had been bothering all of us: ‘Yes, it’s very interesting, all this showbiz tackle, Jimmy, but if you’re constantly dealing with Elton, Rod, Mick and Keef, then what are you doing on a rust-bucket ferry with a bunch of well-oiled wazzocks from Poulton-le-Fylde?’

  Quimby smiled enigmatically and said, ‘An investment in the future.’ This was quite patently bullshit, as the only investment Jimmy Quimby ever made was in a bank account on the Isle of Man.

  Nevertheless, years in the business had given him a certain financial acumen, which was not without its uses on tour. His ability to feed himself, two roadies and a full band for under a fiver was little short of miraculous. The trick hinged on the exploitation of a design fault found in many Dutch service stations. On collecting a tray, you immediately find yourself disappearing behind a partition to select your hot food, subsequently re-emerging twenty feet further on at the drinks dispenser, before moving finally to the check-out. This gives you a good two or three minutes out of sight of the eagle-eyed assistant at the till. The plan therefore, beautiful in its simplicity, was to order fish, chips and, naturally, it being continental Europe, mayonnaise, which you would then eat in approximately ninety seconds before binning the plate in the salad bar and emerging at the pay station with a tray bearing only a small beaker of Fanta. A surreptitious cough from orchestrator-in-chief Quimby would inform you that an incriminating smudge of salad cream on the upper lip was in danger of threatening the heist. This would be rectified with a hurried wipe of the sleeve or a spectacular sneeze into a serviette, in the hope of giving the impression that you were suffering from a particularly heavy cold.