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

  Well, it had to be a long shot, but it was worth a go.

  ‘When we booked the seats we were told there was a chance of upgrading, ho-ho boom-boom,’ said Lard.

  The demeanour of the primped and permed personification of corporate cheeriness behind the desk changed abruptly. She wrinkled her nose and narrowed her eyes as if detecting the aroma of German shepherd excrement on a size-eleven Doc Marten, which we subsequently realised was exactly what excess baggage Lard had brought with him to the terminal. The idea of allowing the three of us into the Club Class cabin evidently filled her with horror, and it’s quite possible that the colour drained from her cheeks, although it’s difficult to be sure with someone wearing that much make-up.

  ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do, but you can’t possibly be considered for an upgrade dressed like that,’ she said with some disdain.

  We were dressed as any sensible long-haul passenger is, in clothes designed primarily for comfort. Only the clinically insane or heavy-metal bands from the West Midlands, and occasionally a combination of the two, would board a transatlantic plane in skin-tight leathers and cowboy boots. We were wearing entirely unremarkable sweatshirts and jogging pants, although Lard’s Dead Kennedys T-shirt may have been ill-advised in retrospect.

  ‘Well, what do you suggest we wear?’

  ‘A collar and tie would help.’

  ‘But our bags have been checked in.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do, then. Come back when the aircraft is fully loaded and I’ll let you know.’

  Wandering in the direction of the bar, we passed a franchise outlet of a high-street chain I’m not at liberty to name here, but which sells ties admirably displayed on racks. I looked at Lis. Lis looked at me. Lard looked into the middle distance.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Lis.

  ‘I think I might be thinking what you’re thinking,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ said Lard.

  Rushing into the shop, we breathlessly explained our predicament to the assistant, who was genuinely, and fortunately, the most helpful person I’ve ever encountered behind a shop counter. Lard and I quickly selected silk blouses and large kipper ties emblazoned with screened images of what looked suspiciously like kippers. We promptly donned our new purchases right there in the shop, giving everyone a glimpse of our gibbering stomachs and causing a sudden mass loss of appetite in the adjacent cafeteria. Kitting Lis out proved more difficult due to the fact that there were no women’s clothes in the shop at all.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said the angel at the till. Rummaging in the cupboards located under the tie racks, she eventually emerged with a plastic carrier bag, from which she produced a brown and orange plaid skirt. ‘I keep this here in case of emergencies. You can borrow it if you promise to return it.’

  One short visit to the ladies’ toilets later (Lis, that is, not myself and Lard), we re-presented ourselves for inspection at check-in. The representative of the fashion police (airborne division) looked us up and down, evidently thinking ‘Silk shirt, kipper tie, tracksuit bottoms and moccasins – now that’s what I call style’, and we were officially upgraded. As the plane took off we found ourselves ensconced in the luxury of Club Class feeling decidedly pleased with ourselves, which couldn’t be said for our fellow élite passengers, who’d paid all that extra money to ensure they wouldn’t have to sit anywhere near people like us.

  We were staying just off Times Square in a chic hotel where the lighting was so fashionably low that you needed a miner’s helmet with fully functioning lamp to negotiate your way across the lobby without walking into some disgustingly healthy individual dressed from head to toe in Calvin Klein – which looked very uncomfortable for Calvin. I’d been looking forward to rediscovering New York as I’d been once before when I was eighteen. I wanted to wander Central Park and amble up to the Museum of Modern Art and ride the subway and take the ferry to Staten Island and visit Radio City Music Hall and pluck up the courage to visit a live peep-show. As it turned out, there wasn’t time for any of this on account of having to leave almost immediately for the gig, which was being staged in a suburb of New York located a short hop outside the city and known to the natives as Boston, Massachusetts. Look, don’t ask. Let’s just say that, with Lard in charge of the itinerary, you learn to take nothing for granted.

  The concert took place at a large outdoor arena with a stage in a covered amphitheatre seating perhaps seven or eight thousand, with a further ten thousand bodies ranged on the remaining hillside. Our sense of expectation was immense and even fuelled us through the turgid chuggings of support act Nine Inch Nails. If you’ve never heard them, you’d be well advised to make every effort to keep it that way, because Nine Inch Nails are a pallid pantomime death-disco act led by Trent Reznor, a prime purveyor of that brand of angst and sense of alienation peculiar to middle-class American college kids. The name alone is enough to raise your suspicions. Trent Reznor. It’s not a real name, is it? It’s one of these Stateside names like Meryl Streep which you feel sure must be anagrams. The eminent Mr Reznor also employed some dubious shock tactics in his recording locations. One of his collections of platinum-selling dirges was recorded at the house on Cielo Drive where Charles Manson’s family had brutally murdered Roman Polanski’s pregnant film-starlet wife, Sharon Tate, along with three of her friends and a young bloke who had the misfortune to be visiting his mate in the nearby gatehouse. Trent later denied he had any knowledge of this, and one can only guess at his surprise when he learnt the truth. There you are renting a luxury holiday home to get a bit of peace and quiet and write a few songs, and it turns out to be the scene of one of the most notorious blood-baths of the late twentieth century. Bad luck and no mistake.

  Shifting uncomfortably from one buttock to another, we were just beginning to get restless when suddenly, in a black leather suit, there he was. As he walked almost nonchalantly downstage, crooning as he came, the audience reaction was nothing short of rabid, although, of course, you would have to say that the vast majority of Americans will whoop and holler at the opening of a bag of crisps. For myself, I couldn’t move or speak at all, let alone whoop and holler. David Bowie had materialised in front of me and I was fourteen years old all over again.

  He had a new band, although long-standing guitarist Carlos Alomar was a comforting presence, as was Mike Garson, veteran pianist in the court of King Dave and celebrated for his psychotic solos, most notably on ‘Aladdin Sane’. Newer recruits included lead guitar strangler Reeves Gabrels, supplier of textures more than a little redolent of the great Robert Fripp, and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, with whom Bowie duetted to devastating effect on ‘Under Pressure’. He played lots of stuff from the new album and a few old favourites, too, including a radical reworking of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. There was even a bit of daft dicking about with chairs and mannequins. It was wonderful.

  We flew back to New York and I decided to go and check out the studio we’d be using to broadcast the programme the next day. As Lis discussed technical requirements with the engineers, and Lard discussed the location of the nearest bar with the janitor, I sat in the control room and began to map out the questions I’d ask the closest thing I’d ever had to a hero. The others eventually went back to the hotel, but I stayed on, filling the gathering gloom with Silk Cut smoke and taking stock of the moment. Here I was, sitting alone in a room just off Broadway, and tomorrow, sitting with me in the same room, would be David Bowie.

  The next morning we met at a diner on the corner of Time Square and had a late breakfast of triple pastrami eggs over easy on rye with Swiss accompanied by grandslam griddle pancake’n’grits with blueberry hash-brown muesli muffins. Or something. We didn’t speak much. I was nervous and Lard had his mouth full, which left Lis with no one to talk to.

  At the studio I checked through all the records and questions and made sure I knew how the equipment worked. The last thing I wanted was for Bowie to think I was a gormless incompetent,
although if he’d heard our shows it was obviously going to be too late to worry about that. The three of us sat in the green-room to wait, drinking coffee we didn’t want, which only made us more hyperactive than we already were. And then suddenly, like Boston the night before and the Manchester Hardrock in 1973, there he was. He had, I think, a manager and a personal assistant with him, but I can’t be sure. I didn’t notice anyone else. There was certainly no entourage, no posse of over-attentive pluggers, no massed ranks of surly security guards. David Bowie was in the same room as me for the third time in my life, but this time he wasn’t yards away behind a fence of footlights, monitors and crash barriers, he was walking towards me offering his hand. I almost committed the faux pas of kissing his ring.

  ‘Hi, Mark, I’m David.’

  Bloody hell, mate, I know who you are.

  He was smaller in real life, but then many of the biggest rock stars are. I remember seeing Jon Bon Jovi in the flesh and watching with interest as his tour manager smuggled him out of the venue in a shopping-bag. He didn’t really, I made that up. It was a suitcase.

  Bowie had had long years of well-documented battles against all manner of addictions, in which case he had no right to look as fabulous as he did. His teeth had been fixed up, but apart from that he looked extremely untampered with, just fit, lean, tanned, hirsute and as relaxed, chatty and smiley as the woman who lent Lis the skirt in the tie shop at Manchester airport, which is by no means faint praise.

  Listening back to that programme now, I’m struck not only by how relaxed he sounds, but by how at ease I appear to be. Bearing in mind I was broadcasting across the Atlantic from a strange new studio with my childhood idol sitting a handshake away, my lack of nerves surprised even me.

  We talked about every aspect of his life and career. He made no preconditions, no attempts to control the agenda. We chatted about the seventies, when he was the biggest star in the world, and about the eighties, when by his own admission he lost his way. He recalled his own look of interest in the making of the two albums he felt represented his creative nadir: Tonight (1984) and Never Let Me Down (1987). He expounded at length the nightmare vision of contemporary life in the fictitious American town of New Oxford that fuelled the concept behind Outside. He revealed the secrets behind his working relationship with Brian Eno, and how the first thing they’d done after arriving at the studio to make the new record was to extensively redecorate. In fact, he’d been in the process of designing wallpaper and admitted that he’d tried the new prints out on his wife, the supermodel Iman, in the bathroom at home in Gstaad.

  He expressed his admiration for Scott Walker, Frank Zappa and especially the early Velvet Underground. He’d just completed filming Basquiat, in which he played the Velvets’ mentor Andy Warhol in the late artist’s own clothes and wig. In a moment of delicious ghoulishness, he described how the smell of the deceased icon’s aftershave lingered on his musty apparel.

  He sent out a message to his son Joe (formerly Zowie Bowie, poor sod), who he’d brought up for long periods as a lone parent. Joe was at college in the States working on a doctorate in philosophy, about which Bowie glowed with paternalistic pride.

  I pushed him to nominate the albums he’d made of which he was most fond. It took him a while to decide on Diamond Dogs and Lodger.

  He was unguarded, unpretentious and unphased by the prospect of an impending coach ride to play in Toronto or by the proximity of Lard. It was as pleasant and thrilling a two hours as I’ve spent in my entire life.

  After the show he posed happily for pictures with Lard and I. One of those snaps is on the wall now. Bowie looks amazing, like a brat-pack movie star in a gothic horror flick. Lard and I look like two fat lads who’ve just met Father Christmas. We even took a photograph of his sandwich.

  After he left, I phoned my wife back in England.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Yeah, it was . . . ummm . . . good.’

  ‘Well, you don’t sound so sure.’

  ‘No . . . it was, yeah, it was . . . nice . . . dunno . . . listen, give me quarter of an hour. I’ll phone you back.’

  It was as if all the nerves I’d suppressed had suddenly come flooding out, depriving me of the ability to speak.

  We adjourned to a nearby bar where ice hockey flickered silently across a dozen TV screens and down-at-heel drunks sat slumped over the bar top waiting for the rain which sheltering from would provide the excuse for not going home. We had plans to go out and see the town, but we just sat in a booth getting slowly smashed. As I sank down towards the bottom of the glass, two thoughts struck me. One was the realisation that the actual David Bowie had come to a studio to talk to Me. The other was that, even in a cosmopolitan city that never sleeps, Lard and I had the ability to find a bar with no atmosphere whatsoever.

  Oh, and I wanted to be in a band again.

  10

  The Shirehorses

  For the next few years Lard and I made a lasting contribution to the golden age of wireless. Night after night we created quality items that we knew would delight and enthral future generations. Such was the pressure on archive storage at this time that the BBC might have strongly considered the possibility of building a new shelf, had not a timely memo from the head of finance indicated that, due to budgetary cuts, all purchases of white melamine from Homebase would have to be put on hold.

  A regular feature of our programmes was musical pastiche. We would painstakingly deconstruct hits of the day, and while skilfully retaining the nuances of the melodic and harmonic intervals would satirise the lyrical denouement to comedic effect. To put it another way, we nicked the tune and bastardised the words to include sexual innuendoes, double (and often single) entendres and, inevitably, the trademark farty noises. It wasn’t an idea you’d call earth-shattering, but it meant that we could mess about with instruments instead of getting on with anything useful. Of course, we were hardly mapping out uncharted territory. There have been many examples of what is known in the business as the almighty piss-take, the most celebrated being the Rutles, Neil Innes’s affectionate hatchet job on the Beatles. A more realistic antecedent of our endeavour, though, would be the Barron Knights. The Knights were a fixture of variety television throughout the sixties and seventies, their career having begun in the beat boom with ‘Call Up the Groups’, which reached number three in 1964. Incredibly, they were still having hits twenty years later, even though the band members, who weren’t exactly pin-up material to start with, had not worn well and the jokes, which weren’t exactly funny to start with, had worn even worse. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that the name the Barron Knights still appears on posters outside God-forsaken soup-in-the-basket dinner-dance cabaret clubs for people who don’t like dancing and don’t care what they eat ‘as long as there’s plenty of it’, but I would imagine the line-up is entirely different, the originals having long since retired to sprawling dormer bungalows in Eastbourne, where the glass-topped, brass-framed coffee-tables creak under the weight of the onyx ashtrays.

  The Barron Knights certainly gave us food for thought, and the germ of an idea began to grow under the rim of the lavatory bowl of creativity, tucked out of the reach of the toilet duck of management. If the Knights could be in a successful band being not very funny and not very good-looking and not the world’s most exciting musicians, then maybe we could do it, too.

  The Shirehorses began to take shape, but with one crucial deviation from the Knights’ blueprint. Instead of simply mimicking the songs, we’d maintain that our versions were the originals and accuse all the acts we’d lampooned of ripping us off. Hence David Bowie pinched ‘Space Oddity’ from the days when we were known as Aladdin-ane singing ‘Bill Oddity’, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds only got the idea of duetting with Kylie Minogue after carefully studying our time as Dick Cave and the Bad Cheese featuring Riley Minogue, the act credited with inventing Australian rock despite coming from the Manchester suburb of Levenshulme.

  Many oth
er pop names owed a major debt, allegedly. Would the Charlatans’ ‘North Country Boy’ have so captivated the fans if the world had already been familiar with ‘West Country Boy’ by the Charley Twins? Would Baby Bird’s ‘You’re Gorgeous’ have been the same global hit if Baby Bloke’s ‘You’re Gormless’ had received the airplay it deserved? ‘Alright’, Supergrass’s defining moment on the joys of being young, seems for ever tainted by Doofergrass’s poignant study of ageing, ‘Feel Like Shite’, while Placebo’s glam-racket classic ‘Nancy Boy’ feels less thrilling after hearing Gazebo’s ‘Lardy Boy’. The much-vaunted blend of Western rock and Indian spiritualism purveyed by Kula Shaker turned out to be a carbon copy of little-known Northern mystics Peela Tater, Edwyn Collins had a hitherto undisclosed role model in Edwyn Bobbins, Monaco had clocked Moronico, the Ramones had their lives changed by the Ra-Gnomes, and John Squire had left the Stone Roses to form the Seahorses after seeing seminal Stockport combo the Shirehorses. We created a whole new musical history for ourselves dating back to the early sixties, and lied so convincingly to support our claims that there were times when even we forgot what was true, although that could have been the lager. It wasn’t the most original or the most hilarious concept in the world, but it was better than the rest of our stuff.

  Like most of our half-baked ideas, the Shirehorses seemed destined to play a cameo role on our night-time radio show, but it was at this point that the story took an unexpected turn. We were approached by a record company about making an album, and when I say record company I mean a real, big, proper corporation with office blocks and pluggers and high-powered executives recently rehabilitated from satin bomber jackets and pony-tails into black Armani.

  The person primarily responsible for inflicting the Shirehorses on a suspecting public was Joan Speight. A woman of plausible credentials, having worked extensively with Jimmy Nail, she knew a quality act when she heard one, and her sound judgement and musical vision had seen her rise rapidly through the corporate ranks. Joining the company as a junior in parcel dispatch, she rose, after just twelve years in the business, to the lofty heights of charge-hand in parcel dispatch. This might not sound much to you, but as any music business insider will tell you, you can have friends in the very highest of places, but it won’t do you any good unless you’ve got mates in the mailroom. You can be personally signed by the chairman of the company and record a landmark masterpiece, but it won’t mean a thing if you’ve fallen out with the bloke who mans the franking machine, who, instead of mailing your creative outpourings to TV and radio stations, dumps the whole lot in a skip. I know for a fact that Kajagoogoo’s career decline could easily have been halted if Limahl had just remembered to drop a nice bottle of sherry off each Christmas with Ernie and the lads in loading bay. A similar thing happened with the Spice Girls. Sales of their second album, Spice World, were initially said to be less brisk than anticipated, despite ‘shipping out’ in massive quantities. Well, there you are, then. What’s the point in having all those records tied up on ships when they should be in the shops? No one ever charted on duty-free sales. As any revolutionary knows, the way to seize power is to control the means of distribution. We had Joan taking care of business and it all paid off when we hit the national album charts at number twenty-two, ahead of Daniel O’Donnell’s Christmas Album. Tapping directly into the sensibilities of the national psyche, our long – (although, at thirty-three minutes, not overlong) playing platter was called The Worst Album in the World . . . Ever . . . Ever. The title represented an ingenious double bluff, as we claimed forcibly in public that it was ironic despite a shared knowledge with the listener that it quite clearly wasn’t. The press was unanimous in its praise. Vox magazine gave it one out of ten and, in pop terms, you can’t get any higher than one. Q gave it one star. A star, imagine that, just like you used to get for good work at school. It was, however, the esteemed Melody Maker that came closest to fully appreciating the intrinsic cultural contribution being made to life in Britain approaching the millennium. Writing not only with a deep understanding but also a new cartridge pen she got for her birthday, the country’s most intelligent rock critic, Jade Gordon, summed it up when she said of the now legendary artefact, ‘This is an immeasurably important feat, not only because a number of rediscovered tracks are genuine masterpieces, but because the history of popular music must be rewritten in the light of the revelations contained therein.’ Quite. ‘But this record isn’t just of historical interest,’ she continues, gushing forth words with effortless poetic grace, ‘it is quite simply a beautiful, intelligent and vibrant collection of songs. Look upon these works, you mighty, and despair’ (Melody Maker, 8/11/97).