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

  The career of the Everly Built Brothers was a brief but by no means ignoble one. The audiences all enjoyed it, from what they could decipher through their alcoholic haze, and those of us on stage enjoyed it as we struggled to remember what we were playing through our alcoholic haze. Eventually, though, I began to get bored with being warmly received, plied with freer beer and subsequently driven home, which makes me wonder if I was in need of psychological help at that time. Having retired from live work with House on Fire to concentrate on recording with the County Fathers to return to the thrill of the gig with the Everly Built Brothers, I now returned to the studio for the ill-fated Deep Blue Day before taking to the pub circuit again with the Hunks of Burning Love. Representing a break with all that had gone before, the Hunks were a rhythm’n’blues band heavily influenced by Dr Feelgood and featuring a lead guitarist known as Wammo. Where the idea came from, I couldn’t say.

  The Hunks of Burning Love rehearsed and recorded in a BBC studio in the dead of night. In days gone by, management would happily have turned a blind eye to this sort of flagrant misuse of facilities owned, ultimately, by the taxpayer. The nineties, however, saw the corporation adopt a much more businesslike strategy where every studio could charge an hourly rate, much like their commercial counterparts in the real world. Fortunately, the new breed of grey-suited statisticians hired to administer these pretend little companies were just as keen to knock off at six as their Civil Service predecessors, leaving all manner of dodgy rhythm’n’blues bands, tape and CD bootleg producers and illicit liquor distillers to beaver away unhindered through the twilight hours. I confess to feeling not the slightest pang of guilt about this. If senior members of staff in large corporations are going to have their palms crossed with dividends, share issues, BMWs and conferences at Skibo Castle, the rest of us can feel justified in taking what we can get. I stole studio time like others steal biros, notepaper, telephone calls, photocopying and the odd computer. Of course, there may be those licence fee-paying readers who consider it outrageous that their contributions should have gone, not towards maintaining excellence in the coverage of news and current affairs or keeping David Attenborough in safari suits, but towards aiding and abetting the production of the Hunks of Burning Love’s Showbusiness EP. To those of you falling into that category, I would say two things. The first is that the money spent on Chateaubriand and claret by management and management consultants in an average month would easily fund the recording of the next Madonna album. The second is ‘bollocks to you’.

  Rehearsals were a relatively straightforward affair thanks to the presence of a far more accomplished rhythm section than we had any justifiable claim on. To describe Deedee the drummer as affable in the extreme would be perfectly accurate, but would leave you little room on the scale with which to pay effective tribute to the level of affability attained by the bassist Charlie Cargo. Music-media mogul Deedee is now a big cheese at a major satellite TV operation, while Charlie is a respected recording engineer and soundtrack composer, so it would be indiscreet to reveal further clues as to their true identities, although their real names are David and Paul. And Dunne and Cargill, but you’ll get no more out of me than that. Accomplished musicians and well-balanced personalities both, they must have had frequent cause to question the company they now found themselves in. I was taking care of the lead vocals and rhythm guitar, and while I could belt out a song with a passable approximation of the Lee Brilleaux growl, my guitar playing was, and I’m probably being charitable to myself here, unpredictable. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the chords. I did. It was just that I was a bit unclear on what order they were supposed to be played in. This chordal amnesia has been one of the recurring frustrations of my adult life, along with Manchester City Football Club’s inability to attain a major trophy (or even mid-table respectability), and the global record-buying community’s continuing love affair with Michael Bolton. How can you spend the best part of twenty-five years playing ‘Summertime Blues’ in E and still go up to the B instead of the A? How is it possible to do this after several thousand attempts? I refuse to believe it’s an abnormality somewhere in my brain. I seem to be able to cope with other, similarly repetitive sequences with little difficulty, for example unbuttoning my flies before urinating. So why am I periodically unable to retain these simple chord progressions? I can only assume that in picking up a guitar in the first place I had failed to adhere to the old adage that a drummer is not a musician but someone who follows musicians around. How does the joke go? Q: What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? A: With a drum machine you only have to punch the information in once. I’m sure I’ll find that very funny when someone explains it to me.

  Phil, by way of contrast, was, and is, a guitarist of considerable natural ability. Or, at least, that’s what I kept telling Charlie and Deedee in the absence of concrete evidence from the increasingly rotund boy wonder himself. If I’m honest, initial rehearsals did not represent one of the outstanding periods of his playing career on account of his propensity for, to use musician’s terminology, turning up smashed out of his brains. This was due in no small part to pressure at work, the principal pressure being how he could get all his business finished by lunch-time so he could spend all afternoon in the pub. At first I just laughed it off, but when he attempted to eat a twelve-inch egg-mayonnaise baguette widthways in preference to the more conventional lengthways, leaving large dollops of filling on his suit that suggested he’d been caught in the crossfire of ejaculating bullocks, I had to have a quiet word: ‘You good-for-nothing, waste-of-space dickhead,’ I screamed, ‘show up bladdered again, you great lard-arsed divot, and we’ll take turns to knee you in the knackers.’ Well, what are friends for? I’m sure that when he reads this he’ll consider that I’ve recalled these events a little harshly, but you’d have to be honest, Phil, my powers of recollection are a lot more reliable than yours in this instance.

  The Hunks of Burning Love lasted about twelve months playing some of the truly seminal live music venues in the north of England. We played the legendary Cheshire Cheese on Rochdale Road, where we encored by accompanying the landlord on ‘Spanish Eyes’. We didn’t know the chords, but that didn’t matter because he didn’t know the words. Great night though that was, we had other, even more spectacular triumphs. Many are those who still speak of our performance at Dick Wilson’s surprise retirement party at the Jabez Clegg, or the night a rabid audience, including my mum, frugged with an abandon rarely seen in the hall of St Stephen and All Martyrs’ C of E primary school. We even played a gig in the bar of Manchester’s central police station on Bootle Street, an evening noted not only for transportation of our equipment being undertaken by two solid coppers and a Black Maria, but also for Wammo’s imperfect negotiation of a frayed carpet tile, resulting in a spectacular sprawl, pint-pot in hand, over a line of off-duty officers and their elaborately coiffured other halves. I don’t wish to be unkind, but you would have to say that these chaps looked like they’d have difficulty finding a brain cell between them. The chances of finding a secure cell in which to throw the bedraggled and bewildered guitarist looked infinitely greater.

  The end of the road for the Hunks of Burning Love came at the end of a night at the Roadhouse, an authentically sweaty basement club on Newton Street. Due on stage at nine-thirty to an enthusiastic and sizeable crowd, we eventually returned from a nearby hostelry at around eleven forty-five to shower a much-depleted and distinctly bored audience with a hail of feedback, slurred abuse and a B in ‘Summertime Blues’ where the A should be.

  The morning after, I realised I’d reached a watershed. I’d always thought that I’d like nothing better than to play music and have a few pints in a pub or club with mates just for fun. It was as much a surprise to me as anyone to realise that actually, after working all week, I’d rather just have the beer and the company and forget about the music. I couldn’t be bothered badgering belligerent barmen for badly attended, badly paid, badly performed gig
s in badly painted, badly lit back bars any more. Nevertheless it seemed almost inconceivable that I was about to give up being in a band with Phil Walmsley. We were soul mates of fifteen years’ standing and as a guitarist he’d just got better and better. Like a fine vintage wine in a dusty cellar, he’d improved with age and spent a great deal of time lying motionless and horizontal. Still, I wasn’t proposing jacking in our friendship, it was just that I realised my playing days were over.

  ‘You’ll miss it,’ said Wammo, ‘it’s in your blood.’

  ‘I’m having a transfusion.’

  ‘You’ll be back doing it again before long.’

  ‘I won’t, you know.’

  As it happened, he was right.

  For once.

  The gig that fired me up all over again happened about a year later, and it wasn’t Lights Out featuring Wammo and Vic at the Bull’s Head in Stockport. Not that they were anything less than really rather good, if you overlooked the saxophonist’s trousers. No, the figure who came to exert a powerful influence on me was a man who’d first proved a major inspiration over twenty years earlier. Which rules out the singer in Judas Priest.

  While pursuing a spectacularly unsuccessful career in rock’n’roll I had, for some time, been cultivating a relatively lucrative sideline as a disc jockey on Radio One. Most aspiring musicians will have a trade to fall back on, and mine was annoying people in between pop records. I was at this point employed four nights a week to present an eclectic mix of live bands, poets, comedians, forgotten psychedelia and sound effects of breaking wind in the peak listening time that all stations acknowledge is between ten o’clock and midnight. Little did I know it at the time, but my three-and-a-half-year tenure of that most coveted slot would prove to be the summit of my success before being unceremoniously shunted into the showbusiness sidings to front a show going out at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. I mean, come on, who’s going to listen at a ridiculous time like that? Milkmen, postmen, insomniacs and long-term residents of psychiatric institutions who’ve failed to receive sufficient sedation, that’s who.

  All manner of swots, divots, hicks and junkies passed through that celebrated late-evening residency, contributing to the cocktail of verse, vibes and verbal volley-ball, but the all-important farty noises were down to one bloke. The Boy Lard. So christened because of the then large and wobbly belly he carried around on the front of his body, possibly on behalf of a skinny old man in a benevolent act of beer-gut surrogacy, Lard’s real name is Marc Riley. He had come with me shrink-wrapped from the old Radio Five, and was revered as a bona fide cult figure thanks to the part he played in the career of legendary Manchester comedy-show band the Fall. His distinctive approach to a variety of instruments ranging from the six-string treble guitar to the four-string bass can still be heard to this day on such defining Fall moments as ‘Hedgehog Gasometer Leg-Iron Syndrome’ and ‘Trolleybus Tea-kettle Leprechaun Complex’. Perhaps Marc’s most lasting and telling contribution to the band, though, came in 1982 when he left, leaving the distraught remaining members, notably Riley acolyte Mark E. ‘Smiffy’ Smith (himself later immortalised in the Television album Mark E. Moon), to struggle on without their guiding light, a struggle that continues to this day with the imminent release of the group’s 537th album, Hip-Archbishop Stick-Insect Spitball Conspiracy Live at the Horse Trials.

  Lard and I became practically inseparable for a while. We began to go everywhere together, which our other friends thought cute when it involved pubs and gigs and slightly alarming when it involved caravan parks and public lavatories. Our partnership was a perfect match of opposites. He was tall, of constant good humour and the life and soul of the open-plan office. I was a small, miserable git who sat in a room on his own. Somehow, though, when we got together the creative sparks really flew, which is pretty much what you expect if both take a night-school course in arc welding.

  Not since meeting Phil Walmsley in 1976 had I had a proper best mate, and it not only felt great but made working for a living a hell of a lot more fun.

  Back in those heady days of evening broadcasting, we used to ensure the steady flow of creativity by organising regular think-tanks. Initially we thought once every eighteen months would be about right, but such was the programme’s voracious appetite for quality items that the think-tank became an annual event. (Incidentally, the think-tank in question is now located in reception and filled with tropical fish swimming aimlessly back and forth over a novelty ceramic bridge, though what use a fish would have for a bridge is a puzzle to me.)

  It was at one of these think-tanks that Lard made his cataclysmic suggestion: ‘Blimey charlie. Oops-a-daisy maisie. Fancy a brew?’ he began, his conversation often made up entirely of catchphrases. ‘Dave Bowie out of the Dave Bowie band has got a new album out and apparently it’s his best for years.’

  This, to be frank, wasn’t saying a great deal. After making a series of albums pretty much unmatchable for innovative songwriting throughout the seventies, the eighties had been characterised by patchy affairs like Never Let Me Down and Tonight, often referred to by musicologists as crap. The new record turned out to be a gloriously overblown futuristic concept album in the timeless Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs tradition. A nightmare vision of post-millennium plumbing, it was called Outside Toilet, although this was shortened to simply Outside on release.

  ‘Ooh, my life,’ continued the bulbous one. ‘Apparently he’s doing dates in the old US of A with a new band, so why don’t we go over there and interview him? Cod balls, battered fish.’

  Our producer at that time, a woman who for the sake of argument we’ll call Lis Roberts on account of that being her name, looked at Marc in much the same way that vets look at kittens with broken legs on Animal Hospital.

  ‘Good idea. Just one drawback that I can see. What makes you think that an international rock megastar and all-round icon is going to consider it crucial to his comeback plans to spend two hours of a hectic schedule in a small padded cell with you two?’

  Lard was undeterred. ‘Well, if you don’t ask you don’t get. I’m great, me. GET TO BED!’

  It was Marc himself who got the telephone number of Dave’s manager. I wasn’t there when he made the call, but thanks to painstaking research, principally investigation of ear-witness accounts and amateur footage, we can now recreate that historic conversation:

  ‘Hello. Dave Bowie’s office. Dave’s manager speaking.’

  ‘All right, mate, it’s Lard here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yeah, nice to talk to you again. Listen, does Dave want to be on our show? We’ll come to you if he can’t be arsed coming here.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll ask him.’

  At this point a hand is placed over the receiver and it is impossible to decipher the words, although an agonised yelp and a lavatory flushing are clearly audible.

  ‘Yes, all right, then.’

  ‘Well, never mind. I had to ask.’

  ‘New York, September 24th.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’ll do it.’

  ‘Nice one. Oh, by the way, is there any chance of his complete back catalogue on CD and a couple of T-shirts? . . . Hello? . . . Are you there? . . . Bloomin’ heck, I must have been cut off.’

  So it was that Lard, Lis and I presented ourselves for check-in at Manchester airport bound for JFK and the great glittering city beyond, known throughout the world as the Big Orange. When booking the tickets, the travel agent had told us that, because we were media folk, it might be worth asking for an upgrade. The upgrade is a bizarre transaction which basically consists of the airline selling you a seat and then, once it’s been paid for, you asking them for a better one. ‘What’s in it for them?’ I hear you ask. I haven’t a clue, is the answer. Perhaps they’re hoping for glowing praise and gratuitous mentions in the programme, but it all seems very strange to me. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a bowl of soup and then, when the waiter brings it to the table, say, ‘I
’m with the BBC, you know. Is there any chance of an upgrade to the lobster thermidor?’ You don’t order a bottom-of-the-range VW Polo and on collection announce, ‘I’m on the radio, I am, what would you say to an upgrade to a GTI, our kid?’