Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Page 14
Inevitably, this leads to you phoning again twenty minutes after your initial call to be told that ‘the driver’ll be with you in two minutes, he’s just around the corner’. Well, fancy that. Despite being only yards away, however, the driver, obviously keen to cause the prospective passenger maximum irritation, manages to achieve speeds so low that arrival from ‘just around the corner’ still takes up to half an hour. I don’t know who it was who said that time is an abstract concept, but they’d obviously worked for a minicab firm.
The second booking of the night was at a large pub in south Manchester, where a local amateur football club had booked a large function room in which to hold its annual awards evening. Mid-ceremony, when we made our belated arrival, the assembled pack of Sunday league bullet-heads and their respective candyfloss-haired bimbettes did not take kindly to the invasion of amply lubricated student types carrying, among other things, a stainless-steel sink. Directed to the far end of the dance floor, we began to unpack our instruments of torture, filling the entire width of the room in the process. Behind us, against the wall, was a buffet laid out with every manner of food you could think of if you were particularly unimaginative in matters culinary. What it lacked in creativity, though, it more than made up for in quantity. There were enough egg fingers, Scotch eggs and pork pies on that table to feed a squad of overweight, pug-faced soccer psychopaths, which was just as well under the circumstances. Surveying the clientele, we decided to forgo the warm-up acts. We predicted we were going to have trouble getting away with the main set as it was, but, bladdered as we were, we could see that if confronted by Phil in his underpants doing ‘Man being eaten by crocodile’ behind a grubby tablecloth, the crowd were liable to turn very ugly. Most of them were halfway there already.
As we launched into ‘Ging Gang Gooly’ for the second time that night, it became immediately apparent, even more so than usual, that something was wrong. Dougie, being stone-cold sober and therefore quicker off the mark, identified the problem straight away: ‘Where the hell is Paul?’
‘Jesus Christ, I thought he was in the van with you.’
‘No, you tosser, you said he was going in your cab.’
Whoever’s fault it was, the end result was that our esteemed saxophonist had been left stranded in Manchester with no idea where the second gig was taking place. This proved catastrophic during ‘Too Much Sax’, which was hurriedly rewritten as ‘Too Much Organ’, but it just wasn’t the same. The already depleted sound was also plagued by a continuous low growl. Further investigation identified the source of this bowel-loosening rumble as Baz’s bass, propped up against his amplifier while the absent social secretary sated his appetite at the otherwise untouched buffet. I think we’d have got away with even this, had not the part of ‘Delilah’ containing the words ‘I saw the pie in his hand’ been dramatically embellished by the hurling of a Holland’s meat beauty, which caught Jack ‘Mad Axe’ Carlton a glancing blow on the back of the head before landing amid the raffle prizes. At this point I could describe the pitched battle that went on in the car park following the performance. I could recount how we were savagely beaten for some considerable length of time for turning the club’s social gathering of the year into a farce. Sadly, it would all be lies, because the only violence took place in the lavatories, where a consummate head-butt was administered to the underweight and undeserving Dougie Somerfield. Our part-time trumpeter Chambo, who had made the arrangements through a friend of a friend, quickly took the club captain’s charitable and sensible advice to ‘get these twats out of here before we beat the living shit out of them’. Some people have no sense of humour, although I don’t think it was the lack of humour that was the problem. It was more the lack of pies.
The ranks began to get a bit depleted after that. The line-up was never what you might call stable, but the night only three of us turned up to play made Phil, Stig and I realise that the band, always at breaking point, had finally snapped clean off in several places and was going to need more than Araldite this time. We never heard from Dougie again, Chambo had been told in no uncertain terms that he could seriously damage his health if he was seen out with us on other occasions, and hacked-off Hemingway never forgave us for leaving him that night. J. G. Giant went back to York, where a career in social security fraud and local radio sports reporting awaited him, and Pifco Killerwatt moved to London to live in a Ford Fiesta, eventually becoming a hugely affluent computer magnate.
Still, there were further gigs at the Gallery, where on one notable occasion a double booking had us sharing the stage with a bunch of prog-rockers from Aylesbury. Deciding who should go on first was left to the bands, and so Wammo and I approached their colossal lead singer, who was absorbed in the application of a greasepaint rainbow to his face.
‘Hello, we’re Mark and Phil.’
‘Fish.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Fish.’
‘Fish? What are you on about, pal?’
‘My name is Fish.’
‘Fair enough, whatever you say, big fella. Now, do you want to go on first or second?’
‘Och,’ said Fish, who was Scottish, ‘we’ll go on first because we’ve got to drive back to Aylesbury.’
And so it came to pass that Bob Sleigh and the Crestas were supported by Marillion, and there aren’t many people in showbusiness who can make a boast like that.
8
House on Fire
The illustrious career of Bob Sleigh and the Crestas straddled that crucial watershed in our lives when we ceased being students and stumbled out, blinking, into the bright light of having to work for a living. Neither Wammo nor I has ever made what you might call a wage from music, and there are those who’d wager that we’ve never made what you might call music, but the Cresta gigs certainly eased the financial pain of a life without grant cheques and subsidised bars. Wammo’s intense dedication to the study of house-brick theory, lintel science and gas-fired central heating technology began to pay off as he took his first steps up the ladder of the construction industry. My years of being a pain-in-the-neck hyperactive gobshite also stood me in good stead as I embarked on a working life in radio, first at a local station in Manchester and then at a national station in London with ‘One’ in its name.
I’d always promised Phil, and myself, that I’d never desert him or the north of England. We’d been through so much together that we knew we’d be mates for the rest of our lives, and if we’d been gay I’m sure we would have got married. Being strictly heterosexual, our physical relationship remains unconsummated, which I’m sure is as big a relief to him as it is to me. Leaving the frozen wastelands of the north for the playboy rivieras of the south was something I thought I’d never do, but it was one of those opportunities that you just sensed wouldn’t present itself again. In a similar moment of infallible intuition, I bought tickets to see the Rolling Stones at Roundhay Park in Leeds, confident that this would be the last time they would perform together as a band. This was 1982, since when they have toured the world four times, although punters paying through the turnstiles these days are denied the full visual feast of the charismatic bassist Bill Wyman, a man who brings a whole new meaning to the adjective ‘statuesque’. Off I went, then to seek out the high spots, the fleshpots and the tosspots of the London media circus.
I came back, though.
It was a couple of years down the line, and I was entering that peculiar late twenties time of life when you start to realise you’re not eighteen any more, a realisation that dawns on the female of the species on their nineteenth birthday. It’s a time when all sorts of peculiar facets of the ageing process become apparent. For the first time since childhood you start to buy clothes at Marks & Spencer. Without actually having made a conscious decision to go there, you find yourself at B & Q considering the relative merits of the Bosch and the Black & Decker power drill, surrounded by a lot of middle-aged people dressed in beige. What did all these people do on a Sunday before the advent of the DI
Y superstore? You still buy records, but you are now old enough to witness yet another technological breakthrough in recording format, so you repurchase all the albums you first got when you were fourteen on CD DAT minidisc or digitally remastered laser-reissue wax cylinder. Bring back the eight-track cartridge, I say. My own record collection is a considerable one, it being to some degree a tool of my dubious trade, but its size is swelled by the presence of various Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Nick Drake and Talking Heads albums on several formats each. There’s a chain of stores in many city centres called Past Times specialising in gifts evoking memories of bygone eras. You can get things like medieval chess sets, Clarice Cliffe coasters, Edwardian tea cosies and scented Victorian leg-irons. I know I’ll have truly become an old man when they start stocking Sex Pistols LPs: ‘Relive those innocent Olde Englishe punk rock days of the late 1970s with this luxurious facsimile vinyl edition of Never Mind the Bollocks.’
There are the physical manifestations of getting older, too. Ninety per cent of men will apparently experience a gradual thickening of the waistline irrespective of the number of red-faced road miles they pound along the verges of our gridlocked highways. This means that all those hours of unwelcome exercise result only in existing excess poundage being redistributed around the body so that instead of being above the belt-line the belly may eventually come to rest below it, like those eminently large-trousered elders who inhabit crown-green bowling clubs. Of course, you can always take solace from the knowledge that you’re a source of huge amusement to passing motorists: ‘Hey, kids, look at the funny, sweaty, waddling fat man.’ The inevitability of growing pear-shaped might seem a cruel blow dealt to most men by the great feminist matriarch Mother Nature, but in time you may come to look on it as a blessing. You might as well eat and drink what the hell you like if you’re going to end up a blob anyway. Imagine how depressing it must be to die with a beer gut after forty years of abstinence.
Apart from the spare tyre there’s the hair loss issue to contend with. Strangely enough, the thinning of the thatch on the head experienced by most men is accompanied by an illogical and downright irritating spurt of growth in all areas of the body you’d least like to have hair appear. Personally, I have unwittingly cultivated a sparse but nevertheless unmistakable pubic triangle in the small of my back. I’ve also noticed that the new hair crop seems to find the sheltered conditions prevalent in my nostrils and ears hugely fertile. I suppose one day I’ll be like my grandfather, who for special occasions, while my grandmother was at the hairdresser’s having a shampoo and set, would visit the barber’s to have his head shaved and his nose trimmed. I’ve recently seen pictures of a man with eight-inch nasal hairs, and it is truly the most repulsive sight you will ever see. Extraordinarily, this bloke had a loyal and loving wife, which just goes to show that either there’s someone for everyone in this world or, worried that there isn’t, some women are not too fussy. There are even some who’ll sleep with David Mellor.
In many ways I can keep my unwanted pastures under wraps with a little prudent topiary and the refusal to remove my shirt in public, which at least makes me more fortunate than Phil Collins. Poor old Phil’s unwanted patch of scrub has had the audacity to appear on the front of his otherwise smooth head. Perhaps it’s healthy that bald men like Phil become hugely successful to prove to others that a gleaming pate is no barrier to the ambitious, although I can’t imagine there are too many blokes who want to emulate the look of Collins on the cover of his No Jacket Required album, where the red lighting has lent him an alarming resemblance to a baked bean.
Naturally, many men who suffer hair loss investigate various ways of concealing the problem. The cheapest of these are aerosol sprays in a range of colours, rather like those available for covering small patches of corrosion on the bodywork of your car, although there aren’t many people whose natural hair colour is metallic green. Snooker whirlwind Jimmy White once endorsed such a product in a series of newspaper adverts, explaining how his confidence had returned since he discovered the joys of painting the top of his head. That it works cannot be in doubt; if you can paint over damp patches you can paint over bald ones, and if you’re talking large areas you can hire a local painter and decorator to do the work for you. However, it’s only ever going to be a temporary measure. Presumably, this was why the same inestimable Mr White appeared in promotional literature some time later extolling the virtues of a revolutionary surgical procedure. As I understand it, this involved slicing the bald area, removing the skin, and bringing the hair at the edges of the cranial crop circle inwards to cover the exposed area. There are several problems I can see with this. One is that if you go in with a short haircut you’re going to finish up with the whole lot somewhere above your ears. Another is that there’s the possibility of closing the hole in the hair layer only to find that subsequent loss leaves the transplanted island isolated in a sea of scalp, like a photographic negative of a monk’s ring. Of course, I don’t claim any medical expertise in this area, but I would also imagine that a further side-effect of having your head sliced open would be, to use the condition’s correct scientific term, shitting yourself.
The only well-documented cure for baldness not endorsed in the national press by Jimmy White would seem to be the bat technique. This involves the purchase of a peculiar frame on which the sufferer is strapped and suspended with his feet pointing upwards. The resultant rush of blood to the head is then intended to stimulate growth, although I suppose there’s always the chance that the hair is in there somewhere and just needs a little help from gravity to coax it out. There are numerous aficionados who will testify to the success of this inverse suspension, and I’m sure it’s the failsafe way of solving the problem. No one’s going to see your bald spot if you’re hanging upside down with your head an inch from the ground. It’s going to look a bit odd down the pub, though. I think Jimmy White is just going to have to accept the inevitable: many of us are going bald and, as of this moment, there’s not a lot we can do about it. If you’re a member of a band and patches of your hair begin to fall out, then turn it to your advantage. Use superglue to attach small mirrors to the areas of bald skin, and when a stage spotlight catches your bonce you will produce an intoxicating mirror-ball effect. Otherwise, just be stoic as you stand on the dockside of demi-wave waving your tresses goodbye.
It’s also worth considering Elton John. I don’t know what he’s got up there, but it makes him look like Captain Mainwaring dressed up as Pam Ayres, and for years before that he experimented with what I believe is known as a weave, which sounds like something that would need regular maintenance from a professional thatcher. Consider also Bruce Forsyth, who appears to have half a coconut on his head. If these people, with all their limitless riches, can’t find an effective solution, then what chance have the rest of us got? For this I think we should congratulate them. They’ve saved us a fortune. Like a painful divorce, if your hair has decided to leave you there’s not much you can do about it except hope, in the words of Bruce Willis, that you’ve ‘got a good head shape’. Alas, even this proved a vain hope for a chap I know who went bald only to discover his head was pointed. Bad luck, eh?
The Manchester I’d returned to was on the brink of another musical explosion. The Hacienda had become the hippest club in the country with coach parties travelling from the cultural wasteland of the south of England to sample the throbbing sounds and flashing lights. It was a bit like a day trip to Blackpool illuminations on Ecstasy. Tales began to spread nationwide of the unique atmosphere of the Hac and what a great night you could have there if you managed to avoid being shot. For a while it seemed like the concept of a live band could be superseded as a form of mass entertainment by the faceless DJ, often the best kind, who mixed dance grooves for a rabid audience. Concerts had once more become the prehistoric rituals that punk was supposed to have abolished. Increasingly, people were asking why they should be herded into a concrete cattle shed to wait for two hours until
the rock gods deigned to bless the devotees with their presence when the same two hours could have been spent in a collective house-fuelled nirvana. A whole new generation of music lovers was beginning to emerge, and it was a generation hooked not on the e´litism of the mega-band but on the democracy of the dance floor. In many ways the house revolution bore uncanny resemblances to punk. Both had a soundtrack that arrived on the streets and initially made its way into the charts without the major record companies knowing anything about it. Both had a national network of venues which existed outside the regular concert circuit, and crucially both had a committed audience who were there as participants and not merely spectators. Like a football match, the crowd was part of the theatrical event and not a mute witness to it.
As someone who was rooted very much in the world of traditional rock, I began to feel more unfashionable than even I was used to, as it seemed the conventional beat group might be consigned to the past along with space hoppers, drip-dry Bri-nylon shirts and packets of crisps with the salt inside in a twist of blue paper. I needn’t have worried. A new breed of bands was on the move, but crucially they were bands brought up not on Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones but on dance music. A hybrid of house and rock’n’roll had grown in the most natural and organic way, and as it tapped into the consciousness of both the gnarled old rocker and the bright young raver it had to be a winner. Manchester was in the process of becoming ‘Madchester’, and record company A & R people began to arrive at Piccadilly Station hoping to sign one of the dozens of bands who overnight became adept exponents of the new genre. Lots of acts got deals at that time, and I hope they invested wisely, but there were only two names that mattered: Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.