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

  I won’t bore you by describing the rest of the songs we played that night, and perhaps we should have spared the audience the boredom of listening to them. Suffice to say that they all sounded exactly the same: bass, drums and vocals struggling to be heard over Les Bartlett’s art-rock terrorist assault. As we left the stage to a smattering of appreciative whistles, we encountered representatives of most of the other bands who’d appeared that day. Astonishingly, many of them proffered their hands and expressed admiration at the energy of our performance, which meant that they were, in that peculiar Dutch way, either addicted to cordiality or stoned out of their minds, and quite possibly both. You have to remember that these were people who’d been playing ‘Smokestack Lightnin’ for thirty-five years, not out of a deep love of the blues, but because they were too out of their trees to play anything else and too deferential to each other to suggest anything different. Unexpectedly, the promoter was extravagantly enthusiastic about our ‘show’, as he inexplicably referred to it, and gleefully announced that he’d handed over the full fee to Mr Quimby. Others backstage were less forthcoming in their praise, although the head of security, inordinately courteous for a jumped-up bouncer, thanked us for dispersing the crowd in dribs and drabs, therefore averting a crush at the exists. Naturally, being Dutch, the indigenous population spoke much better English than we did, but as we left the site we could see gaggles of mud-caked unfortunates reading the posters to try and ascertain the true meaning of the word ‘blistering’, which had patently lost something in translation.

  We headed for the ferry terminal in convoy; two roadies, the band and the equipment in the van following Jimmy Quimby’s Cortina Ghia, which contained the eminent Mr Q along with his recently and mysteriously arrived wife. There was no sign of Eric Clapton, though. The journey home was largely uneventful, and in truth our mood was relatively buoyant, not only because we were glad it was all over, but also because we’d fully expected to be beaten to a pulp by incandescent Europeans demanding a full refund and private medical treatment.

  At the docks, vans and cars were forced into separate queues and so we lost sight of Jimmy Quimby, who had already planned for this eventuality by arranging to meet in the bar once we had set sail. Sitting in Captain Barnacle’s Lagoon Saloon, we reflected on the past few days:

  ‘Christ almighty, I don’t know how we got away with that.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a good job they’re used to bobbins bands over there.’

  ‘Remind me never to play again, ever.’

  ‘Has anyone seen my teeth?’

  It was only after an hour or so of such compelling conversation that we began to sense that all was not well. Where was Jimmy Quimby and, more to the point, where was our money? Whether the great impresario would ever have paid us on board as promised, we never had a chance to find out, due to the fact that he never made it on to that particular crossing on account of the bags of speed that were found in the boot of his car. The drive back up north to home soil was accordingly a sullen affair, particularly as Brian and Bendy, the roadies, had had to accept that there would be no pay cheque at the end of three days of rain, noise and stolen food. To their eternal credit, they didn’t just dump us as soon as we docked in Sheerness, but out of the goodness of their hearts, and seeing that our plight was every bit as bad as theirs, drove us to the outskirts of Manchester before dumping us on the hard shoulder. Obviously we couldn’t carry the drum-kit, but they promised to look after it until we could collect it. Needless to say, we never saw that Slingerland again, and I can only assume they took it in lieu of wages.

  Guitars in hand and empty of pocket, we had no alternative but to embark on a six-mile trudge through the breaking half-light of dawn back to the Booth Avenue hovel.

  ‘Hey, Phil, at least there’s one thing to be grateful for.’

  ‘Oh yeah, and what’s that, then?’

  ‘My boots have dried out.’

  7

  Bob Sleigh and the Crestas

  The aftermath of the Holland débâcle proved to be a testing time. On arriving back at our flat, everyone made themselves uncomfortable on a stuffing-spewing settee or damp divan to grab some much-needed sleep. Rising around tea-time, it immediately became apparent that me and my girlfriend, who in the interests of protecting her identity we’ll call Sara and not her real name, which is Sally Medlock, had a problem on our hands. After feeding them sumptuously on crumpets, button burgers and alphabetti spaghetti, we considered our charitable work manning a soup kitchen for the Fylde’s down-and-outs to be over, and, as they showed no sign of moving on, began to drop mild hints into the conversation. Stretching prodigiously, I said, ‘Blimey heckers, this trip’s taken it out of me big style. I think I’ll be back to my pit soon.’

  ‘Yeah, me, too,’ murmured Des, barely taking his eyes off a particularly engrossing edition of Opportunity Knocks.

  ‘I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get back to Poulton, then,’ offered Sara.

  ‘No rush,’ said Les Bartlett. ‘Gran’ll have watered my conker trees.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed, is there?’ I pleaded.

  ‘You’re right there, Sparky,’ chimed Wammo. ‘I suppose my old bed’s still where it was?’

  ‘Yes, with the same sheets still on it. I would have changed them, but I haven’t got round to borrowing a hammer and chisel.’

  As the evening wore on and Opportunity Knocks gave way to Coronation Street, a folk opera set in considerably more luxurious surroundings than the ones we found ourselves in, it became obvious that our gentle suggestions were having no discernible effect. I decided to take a less subtle course of action.

  ‘Right, lads, you’ve had a kip, we’ve fed you and let you dry off your underpants on the gas fire, and now I’d be obliged if you’d all piss off.’

  ‘Ah, well, there’s a bit of a problem there, Mark.’

  Thanks to Jimmy Quimby, we’d come back without a penny, and as Sara and I were, as was the prevailing fashion at the time, students on the dole, we did not have the means to finance return travel to Poulton-le-Fylde for these three stooges, by which I mean the badly dressed, improbably coiffured, distinctly unfunny film pillocks Curly, Larry and Mo, and not the drop-dead-cool backing band of Iggy Pop. There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t put them out on the streets – the other dossers would have complained about the smell. We would just have to put them up for two or three days until the next giro cheques came through.

  Re-ensconced in his old environs, Wammo noticed with some disapproval the changes that had been made in his absence.

  ‘Oi, what’s happened to the fungus I grew on the kitchen wall? It took me ages to nurture that, and now someone’s scraped it all off.’

  ‘A woman’s touch, Wammo, a woman’s touch.’

  Those few days seemed like an eternity as Des spent long hours in front of the telly doing a passable impersonation of a bean-bag, and Wammo spent long hours in the bathroom evacuating his bowels. I’ve come across many men who spend inordinate lengths of time engrossed in the art of defecation, but Phil was in a league of his own. It’s quite common for people to retire to the privacy of the water-closet with a newspaper, but he went in there with the New Musical Express, a copy of International Musician magazine, a biography of Keith Richard, a large mug of tea and a Tupperware box of meat-paste sandwiches. He packed more stuff to go for a poo than he did to go to Holland. The genial Les Bartlett had no annoying habits at all, apart from leaving his dental plate lying about on the kitchen worktops so you’d inadvertently put your hand on it just before dining handsomely on potato cakes and pot noddle. It curbed your appetite, I can tell you.

  Eventually dole day came around and we gleefully handed over the cash for the train fares. It meant a week living on Cup-A-Soup, but it was worth it.

  Astonishingly, the sorry Skrewdriver story didn’t end there. Don’t ask me why, but I went back on the road to do a few gigs to unsurprisingly small but mystifyingly
enthusiastic audiences at premier-league rock venues like the Leeds Fforde Green Hotel, the Manchester Mayflower, the Digbeth Turdbowl and the Dumfries Stagecoach; this despite Des’s insistence that he didn’t want to play in any ‘out-of-the-way places like . . . Scotland’.

  It’s strange thing about being in a band that you are simultaneously drawn together while finding the prospect totally repellent. Between the spells of not speaking to each other and beating the bass player senseless, there are periods of camaraderie and good humour that are utterly addictive, and every so often you need to top yourself up. The gig that convinced me to go into detox took place at another venue that has since become what you might call legendary if you were an inveterate liar: the Golden Diamond Club, Sutton in Ashfield.

  Sutton in Ashfield is approximately sixty miles from Manchester, and on a bad day it can take you two hours to drive there, should you feel the compulsion to do so, which is distinctly unlikely. Despite its comparative proximity, we managed, through a combination of misfortune and incompetence, to make the round trip last close on forty-eight hours. The promoter was a breed we’d not encountered before in that he seemed intent on leaving himself broke as well as the band.

  ‘I’m sorry, lads, but I’ve completely forgotten to advertise the gig at all,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll let you have one hundred per cent of the door takings.’

  This sounded more than fair under the circumstances, although we had no way of knowing that the number of people who would cough up the seventy-five-pence admission charge would be three. There were four of us in the band, three roadies with the PA and a van driver, which meant that on a straight eight-way split we could look forward to a reward for our labours of around twenty-eight pence each.

  Later in the evening this alleged promoter, a charitable fellow unlikely ever to become a close associate of Harvey Goldsmith, gallantly offered everyone free beer. In retrospect, he probably considered his kindness ill-judged. We eventually staggered on to the stage around midnight, blind drunk, and proceeded to produce the most unpleasant sound it was possible to hear, not counting a Whitesnake concert. Some hours later, the exasperated landlord pulled the plugs and called the police to eject us from the premises. Loading PA cabinets and drum-kits into a van by police flashlight at three o’clock in the morning on a God-forsaken windswept mudflat in Sutton in Ashfield may not sound like much fun, but, to be honest, we were too bladdered to care.

  ‘Right, then,’ boomed one stout representative of the local constabulary, ‘and who’s the driver?’

  ‘He’s sleeping off a skinful in the toilets, Officer,’ said Wammo helpfully.

  ‘So there’s not one of you who’s under the limit, then?’

  ‘There’s not one of us who can remember what the limit is, Constable.’

  With a heavy sigh, the two policemen conferred before loading us all on to the van, driving us to the county border and dumping us in a lay-by in the middle of nowhere. For the second time in recent memory I was stranded, penniless, on the hard shoulder with a bunch of imbeciles who would struggle to put on a new pair of Y-fronts without reading the instructions first. That was the straw that broke the donkey’s jaw-bone, and when we got back I told Wammo in no uncertain terms that I’d had enough.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ I said.

  ‘Those sound like no uncertain terms,’ said Wammo.

  I didn’t see Phil for the rest of that summer, but when he returned in the autumn we went to a gig which provided the inspiration for our next doomed stab at the big time, although we’d have happily settled for a stab at the medium time, it being one step up from the small time. We’d heard about a sound coming out of Coventry under the auspices of an independent label called 2-tone. Bands like the Specials, Selecter and Madness, who we subsequently discovered came from London, were repopularising ska and blue beat played with all the attack of punk. In many ways it was an inevitable development, as all the new-wave gigs we’d attended had throbbed to a soundtrack of dub reggae, and the natural outcome of a culture clash of Culture and the Clash was new ska. The three principal exponents of the revitalised genre were selling out venues across the country on their package tour, so it was with a sense of some anticipation that we entered the Manchester Apollo that night.

  Selecter came on first, and we were immediately impressed by the suits. They wore tight tonic two-pieces in shimmering mohair, even lead singer Pauline Black, topped off with sunglasses and pork pie hats. Phil, in particular, was much taken with the concept of the headgear and enthusiastically suggested a beat combo called the Pork Pie Hats, for which each member would wear the crust of a large catering pork pie on his or her head, pausing between numbers to wipe the marrowbone jelly from their eyes. What a visionary that boy was. The band didn’t seem abundantly blessed with great songs, although ‘Too Much Pressure’ and ‘On My Radio’ stick in the memory, but the rhythm in conjunction with the sight of seven band members running on the spot proved hugely seductive. It seems to me that, when sampled live, ska is like Cajun: if you don’t dance, then you’re dead from the neck down.

  After a short break Madness came on, and any last vestiges of scepticism melted away as the nutty boys converted us lock, stock and double-barrel to the ska faith. In truth, Madness would have succeeded in any era, being a sublime synthesis of punk, reggae, music hall and classic English pop. Their songs, in those days largely the work of pianist Mike Barson, owed as much to Ray Davies as Joe Strummer, and sound as effortless and wonderful today as they did when first released. From their ska roots they went from strength to strength with a sequence of timeless singles, including ‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘Grey Day’, ‘Our House’, and one of the truly great pop records of all time, ‘House of Fun’. In their later years they became, like ageing clowns, darker in their outlook. They released more sombre singles like ‘One Better Day’ and ‘Yesterday’s Men’, and dressed in black frock-coats as if they’d become a sublime synthesis of punk, reggae, music hall, classic English pop and a firm of down-at-heel undertakers. That night at the Apollo, though, it was all irresistible ska showpieces, including ‘The Prince’, a tribute to trail-blazer Prince Buster, ‘One Step Beyond’, ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ and their celebrated stab at Swan Lake, during which Tchaikovsky may well have been rotating in his tomb, but if he was, he was doing it in a series of rhythmic jerks. The rhythmic jerks on stage were a joy to behold. They had a bloke called Chas Smash, who has become the most celebrated Bez in pop apart from Bez himself. His job was to dance next to singer Suggs like a man possessed, or a man in fear of being busted for possession, cruise up to the microphone occasionally and from beneath the brim of his pork pie hat emit a string of clenched-teeth ‘chikka-chikka-chikka-chikka’ noises interspersed with the odd ‘oi’. What a splendid chap. At regular intervals he would lead the band in a single-file crocodile across the stage, demonstrating the trademark slow-motion staccato-sprinting Madness dance, which Phil and I would later perform halfway along Hyde Road until we found a kebab house. The great thing about Madness was that they exuded good humour, like they were just a bunch of mates out for a laugh. They took the music a lot more seriously than they took themselves, and that was what endeared them to a generation of fans.

  Championship contenders the Specials were on last and demonstrated the same energy and commitment as Selecter, with songs almost on a par with Madness, but without the unrelenting sense of fun. Specials vocalist Terry Hall is a man of mournful countenance concealing, as I now know through my show-business connections, a wicked sense of humour, but back then we’d had enough glum attitude during the punk wars and were looking for some light relief. Under their general, Jerry Dammers, they were generally more political than Madness, and would themselves come to produce a cache of towering singles, articulating what it was like to be young, unemployed and a victim of racism in the Little Britain of the late seventies and early eighties. Songs like ‘Too Much Too Young’, ‘Rat Race’ and
‘Stereotypes’ struck a chord with the disenfranchised as punk had done three years previously. By far the greatest Specials single, though, was ‘Ghost Town’, where the deadpan Hall intoned the words:

  This town is coming like a ghost town,

  All the clubs have been closed down.

  This place is coming like a ghost town,

  Bands don’t play no more,

  Too much fighting on the dance floor . . .

  against a backdrop of disembodied sirens and slack ska menace. Released in 1981 as inner-city riots swept the nation, it remains as much a snapshot of those times as any news footage.

  In the days that followed the gig, Wammo and I began to hatch plans to become Manchester’s answer to Madness. We figured we had the stupidity in the bank already and just needed to take out a loan on some good songs. We couldn’t run to mohair suits, but we dusted off our narrow, single-breasted Dr Feelgood Oxfam outfits, which we began to wear daily, although the look was let down by the footwear. The baseball boots had long since rotted and had been replaced with a now defunct type of shoe known as the Nature Trek. These consisted of a moulded rubber soul with no instep, on top of which a single piece of leather had been doubled over, resulting in a seam running across your toes and down one side, while the other side was simply a fold. You looked like you had Cornish pasties on your feet. The essence of mod cool they weren’t.