Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Page 13
The next thing we needed was a band, and a big one. One of the things all the 2-tone acts had in common was that there were hundreds of people leaping about on stage singing, playing guitar, blowing into a saxophone or acting the twonk for no apparent reason. We decided to recruit everyone we knew who could play anything, and some who couldn’t play at all but who we thought looked funny.
‘It’ll be brilliant,’ said Phil, ‘like getting all your family together and going on holiday.’
Well, I knew what he meant, but getting your whole family together to go on holiday is often a recipe for disaster. Think about it. All year you live with your nearest and occasionally dearest in a house with a variety of rooms with different designated purposes. At the same time, different family members can watch television in the living-room, listen to the radio and have a cup of tea and a fag in the kitchen, or play loud music to conceal the grunts of adolescent love-making in the bedroom. On top of this, there are further distractions such as video games, telephones, guitars and painting-by-numbers, all designed to keep families out of each other’s hair. Then once a year, for a treat, the whole brood moves into one room in a semi-built self-catering breeze-block prison camp in Tossa de Mar. It’s a wonder they don’t kill each other.
Shockingly, some parents are even more cruel that that, forcing their offspring to spend valuable holiday time in tents or caravans. Do social services know about this? Don’t get me wrong, there are circumstances in which living under canvas is perfectly acceptable, if you are an essentially nomadic people like the Bedouin, for example, or if your house has been demolished by a freak tidal wave. Otherwise forget it. Of course, seasoned campers will try and persuade you of the benefits of their deranged activity: ‘Aah, well, tents are better than they were, you know. Ours has got its own chemical toilet.’ Brilliant. We all know that passing solid waste produces a distinctly unpleasant aroma and a variety of straining and splashing sounds which are best left unheard except by the defecator. Why anyone would want to perform this process behind a flimsy awning, silhouetted by the light of a storm lantern, is a mystery to me. I’ll say one thing for campers, though, at least their tents don’t clog up the roads, which is more than you can say for caravanners. You will already have encountered a beginner’s guide to caravan accessories in Chapter 5, but what of caravanning on the open highway? Why they think the rest of us should travel at ten miles an hour as they negotiate their twenty-five-foot cool box on wheels round the approach to Corfe Castle, I really can’t imagine. I fully believe that caravans should be kept off the road by day, and burnt at night. The arrogance of these people is quite staggering. Why should we be forced to crawl along country lanes behind some bloke who’s too mean to check his family into a guest-house? The humble snail moves slowly with its home in tow, but I think most of us would like to believe we’d worked our way a bit further up the evolutionary scale than that.
The recruitment drive to fill the ranks began in earnest. Friends and acquaintances fell over themselves to hitch a ride on our latest bandwagon. Well, if I’m perfectly honest, most of them fell over themselves because they’d hit the Scrumpy Jack too early, and those that didn’t, fell over themselves because they lacked the necessary co-ordination to walk effectively.
I’d been playing organ in a band called the Brilliantines, which was either a post-modern deconstructivist co-operative or a load of old toss, depending on your point of view. As this book is exclusively concerned with bands who have had a major impact on the twentieth-century Western pop oeuvre, the Brilliantines need not concern us here, but my fellow crypto-situationist art-rock pioneers were among the first to sign up to the blue-beat big band.
There was our old mate Stig Burgess from Bolton, who agreed to ditch his guitar and concentrate on harmonica. Then there was Baz Ilott, the world’s most unreliable bassist, and there can’t be many more hotly contested mantles than that. Baz was a bluff Yorkshireman who’d managed to get himself elected to the sabbatical post of social secretary of the student union. This was, of course, at a time when students were still possessed of a revolutionary fervour and, in an attempt to destabilise institutions from within, filled key union posts with whichever candidate was likely to prove most inept. We liked Baz a lot, and he was a reasonable bass player, but I won’t deny that we cultivated his acquaintance because we thought if we couldn’t get gigs on merit, then it was as well to have the promoter in the band. On drums was a bloke we knew from the poly called Jerome Ballinger. He was known to everyone as J. G. Giant on account of his considerable size, his constant good humour and his ever-present green pullover, which reminded us of the celebrated jolly green giant of golden-niblets-of-corn television-advertisement fame. One of the essential ingredients of the ska sound was the saxophone, so that meant a return on a free transfer from teacher-training for former Zeroid Paul Hemingway, and we also swooped on the chubby and genial rhythm guitarist Jack ‘Mad Axe’ Carlton, whose previous band had set Wigan alight, although he always contested the forensic evidence. Next came two friends of Baz’s called Flash and Mac McMahon. Flash was perhaps the finest jew’s harpist in the department of sociology, and also had the snappiest suit and crop of all of us. He had also managed to retain a perennially youthful air, thanks mainly to the preservation of his pubescent acne. Mac McMahon, known to everyone as Pifco on account of the incident with the torch, was a computer science deserter and major-league pisshead from Belfast who was recruited on percussion, which as often as not meant taking two lump hammers to a double-drainer sink. Completing the line-up were Stig’s tap-dancing girlfriend Looby and our next-door neighbour Dougie Somerfield, who was a drummer of some renown. We already had the Giant signed up as drummer, but we figured it was probably worth having a spare. In fact, there was even a third drummer called Bernie, who we called upon in times of crisis along with tentative trumpeter Chambo, a kilt-wearing white-Rasta electrician from Handforth.
Often there were so many people turning up to play that not everyone got a gig, which is one of the frustrations of the deep-squad system, but as Ruud Gullit and I both know, it’s much easier to keep players on their toes if there’s someone warming up to fill their position. In truth, I don’t know why more bands don’t operate a squad system. If you go and see Pink Floyd or Dire Straits in a football stadium, you’ve no idea who’s up there anyway, so the manager could select his formation on the team bus and switch things around at half-time if it’s not going too well, which admittedly with Dire Straits would be pretty much every gig. Think of the advantages, though, of a stage-side bench of hungry young products of the youth policy, solid centre-back bass players and flighty lead-guitar wingers ready to come on if the old retainers drop a howler or pull up with a strained hamstring incurred while executing an ambitious scissor-kick. If I was the Spice Girls’ manager you’d probably never have heard of them, but I’d be tempted to recruit a few reserves so that if Sporty had to go off following an awkward backflip landing, you could bring on either Sprightly Spice or Spunky Spice, who’d been limbering up in the wings. Of course, in the case of our particular squad we had so many undisciplined mavericks on the books that we were more likely to resemble Everton than Ajax, but I still believe in the basic principle.
There were also a couple of other people who appeared from time to time whose names I never knew. I was in a crowded bar a couple of years ago when a bloke tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘What are you doing drinking my pint?’ Shortly after that, another bloke tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘It’s Mark, isn’t it?’
Never to my knowledge having seen him before, I hesitantly confirmed my Christian name, but could see my reaction was not what he’d expected.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he said, crestfallen.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t. Should I?’
‘We were in a band together.’
‘Were we? Which one?’
‘That ska band.’
‘Really? What position did you play?’
‘Aah, well, no wonder I don’t recognise you, I never used to go over that side much.’
This was true. The midfield ranks were often so crowded that dribbling across the full width of the stage proved impossible for those without the balance of Gio Kinkladze.
‘Well, I’m really sorry I forgot you. What was your role in the band?’
‘I was the one who sat on stage reading a newspaper,’ he announced gleefully, and I had to admit that he did ring some vague bells, or was that someone else again? Had we really had a campanologist on board?
So the definitive line-up was in place: guitar, bass, drums, organ, sax, trumpet, jew’s harp, drums, guitar, harmonica, dance (tap), percussion (mixer tap), newspaper and er . . . drums. All we needed now was a name.
As I recall, the naming of the band was left to the inner sanctum of Wammo, Stig and I. We all agreed that it had to be a name in the fine sixties tradition of a front man and his backing group, like Brian Poole and the Tremoloes, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, or Ringo and the Beatles. There were even contemporary examples in Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Siouxsie and the Banshees and, not least, Echo and the Bunnymen (which led many people to assume that lead singer Ian McCulloch would be more likely to respond if addressed with the formal greeting, ‘Oi, Echo!’). The idea of a fictitious front man appealed to us, as it would not only add confusion to the audience’s existing irritation, but also avoid any power struggles within the ranks. We were all the best of mates, but if anyone had tried to secure star billing for himself we’d have calmly explained to him the error of his ways before smacking him on the back on the neck with one of J. G. Giant’s baseball bat drumsticks. It may well have been the knock on the head that led Stig to come up with the name Bob Sleigh and the Crestas. The moment he said it, we knew it was perfect, but that didn’t stop us coming up with a list of alternatives involving a series of similarly weak puns: Max Headroom and the Low Bridges, Barry Tone and the Tenors, Stevie Dore and the Dockers, Derrick Oil and the Drillers, Al Pine and the Glaciers, Duncan Disorderly and His Pissed-Up Farts all being considered for approximately the length of time it took to sink a pint.
Against all the odds, our first gig proved something of a triumph. We were booked to play at the Manchester University Fresher’s Ball, supporting not only the great lost punk-pop band the Distractions, but also the notorious oven-ready leader of the pot-bellied gang himself, Mr Gary Glitter. When I say we were booked, I mean our bass player just added us to the bill without telling anyone, a blatant abuse of his official position which made Wammo and I glow with a certain paternalistic pride. We’d recruited Baz sensing that he had the potential for wanton misuse of elected office, and he was already paying back the faith we’d shown in him.
We opened with a particularly fiery ska rendition of the old scouting classic ‘Ging Gang Gooly’, before sliding seamlessly into the theme tune from The Magnificent Seven, which in turn gave way to a blue beat bombardment of Sandie Shaw’s seminal ‘Puppet on a String’. Paul Hemingway’s subtle and ingenious saxophone-as-penis-substitute showcase ‘Too Much Sax’ proved a real crowd pleaser, as did the first fruits of the fledgling songwriting partnership of Sparky/Giant: ‘Cresta Rap’ and ‘New Red Shoes’. The latter was inspired by the impoverished Brobdingnagian’s dubious purchase from the bargain bins at Freeman, Hardy & Willis, an acquisition made for financial rather than stylistic reasons. A pair of crimson, crepe-soled coal barges is a perfectly acceptable form of footwear, for the under-fives. In adult size twelve they were a hazard to traffic. Of course, while writing a song about shoes could be readily dismissed as the drunken ramblings of middle-class college boys with far too much time on their hands, it’s easy to overlook the allegorical implications of a couplet like ‘I bought them in the summer sales, And now my feet are like beached red whales’, where the selfsame shoes become a metaphor for the downtrodden specimens left stranded by a cynical society. Similarly ‘Cresta Rap’, a meticulous parody, not of American street culture, but of Adam and the Ants’ ‘Ant Rap’, had a lyrical complexity that extended to the back of a second beer-mat. A ska-tological reworking of Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’ came next, the violent central image of the ‘knife in his hand’ being replaced with a pacifist pie, before a medley of several Western cinema classics took us to our grand finale. This took the form of an homage to the great televisual variety institution of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, where the cream of the world’s light-entertainment talent would bring the show to a fitting climax by waving to the rapturous crowds from a revolving stage. We didn’t have a revolving stage, but we recreated the effect by standing shoulder to shoulder, instruments in hand, and shuffling in a clockwise direction while hammering the immortal strains of the Palladium signature tune. For guitarists, saxophonists and tap-dancers, this choreographic conclusion proved relatively straightforward. For drummers, organists and plumbed-in percussionists, the process proved considerably more taxing, resulting in a spaghetti-like tangle of cables, microphones and stands that resulted in a forty-five-minute delay to the appearance of the Distractions. The new influx of spotty students, spirited along by cheap beer and their first taste of freedom, loved every minute of it. We might even have done an encore, had we had another song and had we not rendered the stage unusable.
Over the next three terms we appeared regularly in clubs, colleges and halls of residence using equipment bought with union funds intended to replace the antiquated disco and sound system in the cellar bar. Improbable as it might seem, demand for our services became so great that we once accepted two bookings on the same night. Wammo and I seriously considered fielding two completely different line-ups who could play simultaneously in separate venues, giving members of our youth squad some much-needed first-team experience. Eventually we rejected this policy on the grounds that both venues would provide us with free beer and we wanted to be there to drink it.
The first gig of the evening passed without incident at a city-centre night-spot known as the Gallery. By this time we’d extended our performance to include several cameo support acts selected from the massed Cresta ranks. Often a busking contingent of three or four members would be selected either by drawing names from a hat, usually a fez, or by having their fingers bent back until they acquiesced. This advance party would then be sent out on to the pavement outside the venue to attract passing casual trade or to send it scurrying across the street, depending on the instrumentation deployed and the level of inebriation of its operatives. At college venues we would commandeer the security lodge and perform a tantalising taster set through the tannoy system. We also provided a succession of novelty attractions, which on this occasion included ‘J. G. Giant’s Your Hundred Best Tunes’ (which involved rolling around on-stage with a drum and a cymbal screaming ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’), ‘Wammo’s Shadow Puppet Theatre’ (which involved rolling around on-stage behind a back-lit and worryingly stained bed sheet), and ‘Flash and Pifco’s Folk Dance Forum’ (which involved rolling around on-stage beating each other with bottle-top-embellished broom handles). All this for the price of one band. What a bargain.
You don’t get that sort of value for money these days. A lot of today’s top bands are really quite proficient, but that doesn’t mean their live shows couldn’t be jazzed up with a full supporting variety show. Wouldn’t it be nice to see Bonehead and Guigsy doing a little puppetry for the kids before Oasis came on? Don’t loyal Radiohead fans deserve the chance to see a blindfolded Jonny Greenwood throwing steak knives at a revolving Thom Yorke? Instead of lounging about backstage like a load of big girls’ blouses, why don’t the Verve take two clean handkerchiefs each and show us they’re no slouches in the Morris-dancing stakes? ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, Michael Bolton will demonstrate his expertise in the oriental art of origami.’ Well, anything that stops the bastard singing
has got to be a bonus. Today’s pop stars just don’t know what hard work is, but then everything’s changed since I was a lad. I can still remember the Glastonbury Festival site when it was all fields.
Having completed engagement number one, we made hasty arrangements to tackle the evening’s second appointment. The web of intertwined leads, instruments and DIY accessories that lay centre-stage was tossed into the back of the mini-van owned and driven by the ferret-like leader of the drum corps, Dougie Somerfield. Dougie was a somewhat isolated figure on account of being teetotal. Having a member of the band who doesn’t drink is very handy when it comes to getting from gig to gig, but they don’t tend to stay around for long. Generally, to use a series of liquid images, they quickly tire of the streams of verbal abuse, the spurts of sporadic fisticuffs and the pools of vomit left on their vehicular upholstery. With the equipment safely in transit, the rest of us set about ordering taxis to transport us to the next theatre of dreams. Naturally, it being Saturday night, this proved problematic. Why are minicab companies staffed entirely by pathological liars?
‘Hello, cab at the Gallery, please. How long will that be?’
‘Five minutes, mate. What’s the name?’
This from a man who knows full well he hasn’t got a hope in hell of picking you up for another forty-five minutes, and then only in a Y-reg Datsun MOT failure driven by a corpulent bigot with BO chain-smoking Superkings.