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

  In truth he was a bit of a rough diamond. That’s to say he was thoroughly disreputable but quite likeable on the days he wasn’t psychotically unhinged. He wasn’t a drummer, but I knew he had some drums; just as he wasn’t a guitarist, trombonist, gardener, chef or stunt motorcyclist, but he had a guitar, trombone, a Flymo, a Moulinex Multichef and a BSA Bantam 500. I never knew for sure that the drums were stolen, but I do remember thinking it odd that they were stored under a tarpaulin in the bushes at the back of his house.

  So, thanks to my covert relationship with the well-hung mastermind of Bolton’s schoolboy underworld, I had thirteen drums arranged around me. They were matched only in that they all sounded dreadful, but it didn’t matter. I had the biggest drum-kit out of anybody at our school, and for the next gig I planned to get some cymbals.

  If Jerry Lumley had taken the time to cultivate a friendship with Barry Halpern he wouldn’t have suffered the indignities that he suffered that night. If he’d just taken the trouble to buy him the odd bottle of cider and admire his penis with the rest of us, then Barry would have found him an electric guitar, no bother. As it was, he had his Eko Ranger 6 jumbo acoustic, on to which had been fitted a pathetic-looking pick-up with two jumbo knobs marked ‘tone’ and ‘volume’. When he strapped this contraption on to his jumbo belly he near as dammit filled the dance floor on his own. As if this wasn’t enough, he had another cross to bear. He had no amplifier. This meant he had to plug his guitar directly into the PA system. The term PA system probably conjures up the same image for most of us: improbably high piles of industrial container-sized cabinets that stand like prehistoric monoliths at the side of the stage. At Lostock Tennis Club the PA system consisted of two speakers that could feasibly have been removed from telephone answering machines, hurriedly installed in a pair of wooden cigar boxes and nailed to the wall. More usually this equipment would have been used by the bingo caller or perhaps, because it was a middle-class venue, by the master of ceremonies at the mah-jong evening. Whichever, it was tinny and crackly and feeble and not what Jerry Lumley had in mind to launch his glittering rock career.

  Davey Bright, on the other hand, stood proudly in front of a rack of speaker cabinets that put even Guy Farringdon’s AC30 to shame. All afternoon, he’d gone to and from his house ferrying, in ever-increasing sizes, a succession of boxes with wires trailing from them. This primitive but superhuman feat of patient construction made you wonder if he hadn’t had a previous incarnation as a site foreman in the Valley of the Kings. There was still nothing to suggest he’d had a previous incarnation as a bass player, but he was a trooper, I’ll say that for him. The reason this elaborate assembly had to be completed in stages was two-fold. For a start there’s only so many cabinets you can carry on a drop-handlebar racer at one time, and secondly he had to wait for his parents to go out before dismantling his dad’s hi-fi and making off with the Wharfedale Super Lintons.

  Eventually his wall of bass bins included his dad’s sizeable Wharfedales, his own stereo speakers boasting the legend ‘Saisho’ and two hessian-covered boxes of indeterminate origin from which no audible sound ever emanated despite, or possibly because of, the hours he spent tinkering inside them with a soldering iron. All in all, it was a pretty impressive ‘stack’, especially for someone who was going to spend the entire set turned off because he couldn’t play yet. This left him free to do what he did really well – shake his hair about.

  No self-respecting band embroiled in the throbbing glammetal scene of the early to mid-seventies would have dared to take the stage without at least one lank-haired tosspot apparently in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease, and ours was Davey Bright. From the opening chords of the first number until the final shout of ‘You’ve been a great audience, we’ll see you again real soon, we’re Berlin Airlift, and Colin, your mum’s waiting in the Chevette outside, goodnight!’ the rubber-necked Bright would toss his ginger mane continuously. Personally I thought he could have stopped during the interminable inter-song tuning breaks, but once he started he was in a world of his own. He would have come desperately close to looking cool – well, as cool as a fifteen-year-old crater-faced ginger bollocks in bicycle clips can look – were it not for two things. For a start, everyone knows that the size of a guitarist’s speaker stack is a penis substitute, so you could only assume he had a button mushroom in his pants. Perhaps Jerry Lumley was banking on the collective assumption that, as he had no amplifier at all, he was in a position to cross swords with Barry Halpern. And on top of Bright’s wall of speakers, clearly visible to the audience, was a large illustrated book titled How to Play the Bass Guitar. This was doubly stupid, because not only did it blow any semblance of respect he might have had, but for that night’s proceedings he didn’t need to know how to play the bass guitar. All he needed to know could be found in two other books in the same series, namely, How to Hold the Bass Guitar and How to Shake the Greasy Barnet. Still, as the old muso proverb goes, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t stop the bass player making a dick of himself.’

  So the stage was set for, if you will, lift-off. Thirteen battered drums took centre stage flanked on one side by a Vox AC30 and on the other by what looked like the haul from a ram raid on Tandy’s. All we could do was wait.

  Each of us had our own pre-gig ritual. I would drink as many free halves of Watney’s dark mild as I possibly could in the hope of avoiding stage fright. All I ultimately avoided were the girls who came to chat casually to the band after the gig, as I was otherwise engaged vomiting casually into a bucket. Guy, on the other hand, would spend his time talking amiably, with the confidence only a large trust fund can bring, to a succession of drop-dead-gorgeous hard-bodied honeys in tennis skirts. Well, each to their own; he might have cleaned up with the totty, but I drank his ale while he was at it. That showed him. Davey Bright was far too busy soldering things to be interested in girls or beer, and Jerry Lumley remained aloof and enigmatic, by which I mean he sat on his own looking grumpy between trips to the lavatory to shit through the eye of a needle. Soon enough we were summoned to take our positions, and on to the stage shuffled the drummer who’d drunk too much, the bass player who’d soldered his fingers together, the guitarist with the raging hard-on and the guitarist with the debilitating diarrhoea. ‘Hi, chicks – we’re the Berlin Airlift.’

  The posh kid’s pissed posh dad who’d booked us took it upon himself to give us a big showbiz introduction. Lumbering on to the stage in his Pringle sweater and gardening corduroys, with his hair combed over from some indeterminate point behind his left ear, and pausing only to liberally slop Vermouth over the main power supply, he grabbed the only microphone and said, ‘Now, then, boys and girls, there’ll be bowls of piping hot-pot all round later on, but first some up-tempo beat music from four young men from Bolton School – Berlin Chairlift!’

  As a call to arms it was hardly ‘Kick out the jams, motherfuckers’, but we were on. Almost. Because there was only one microphone, there was an agonising wait while this pillock in pastel knitwear shuffled round the stage trying to position it for the singer behind the wall of drums. It may have been only a short pause, but in it there was enough time for Davey Bright to finally separate his fingers with a posidrive screwdriver, for Guy Farringdon to thrust his crotch out and wink knowingly at someone by the bar (bastard, I bet it’s Pippa Johnson), for me to belch voluminously and for Jerry Lumley to fart catastrophically into the arse of his ill-fitting brushed-denim flares. We’d chosen to start with the T. Rex gem ‘Get It On’ because not only was it a sure-fire crowd pleaser, being a big hit-parade smash of the day, but it also kept the Farringdon big guns on hold until at least some of the audience had recognised the song we were mangling. Gig one, song one; one, two, three . . .

  Well, you’re dirty and sweet, clad in black, don’t look back, and I love you . . .

  You’re dirty and sweet, oh yeah . . .

  Well, you’re slim and you’re weak, got the teeth of a hydra upon you .
. .

  You’re dirty sweet and you’re my girl . . .

  Get it KERPLLAANGGG . . .

  Bang a KERRFLLUUUNGG . . .

  Get it KERROOINGGGG.

  The fact that the cocksure Farringdon looked so blissfully unaware of the damage his lunatic shards of noise were inflicting on the sensitive ears of the assembled minors only added to the general air of bemusement. The benign coffin dodger who’d come along to serve the hot-pot had evidently been tapping a sensible walking shoe quite happily until gunner Eric let her have it with both barrels, at which point she coughed her false teeth straight into the red cabbage.

  ‘Get Back’ came next, followed by the Move’s ‘California Man’ and Mott the Hoople’s ‘Honaloochie Boogie’, by which time the audience had begun to see a pattern emerging and knew to brace themselves during the choruses. Jerry Lumley was bracing himself as well, although from where I was sitting it looked a little late for that.

  So much for the aural feast that was the Berlin Airlift, but what of the visuals? Davey Bright’s frenzied fringe-flinging was proving immensely popular stage left as with each forceful flop he dipped a foppish frond into a pint of best bitter on a stage-front table. (The pint remained, unsurprisingly, unclaimed until later, when I, equally unsurprisingly, downed it in one before, least surprisingly of all, spewing it up at the base of the umpire’s chair while Guy Farringdon was snogging for England.) The spectacle stage right basically consisted of Guy attempting to look effortlessly cool, despite the front row’s detection of a deeply unpleasant aroma, which they had no way of knowing originated in Jerry Lumley’s trousers.

  The other weapon we had in our eye-catching arsenal was the celebrated Airlift light show. This consisted of a string of coloured bulbs, wired up by Davey Bright and operated by a contact cunningly fashioned from two strips of Meccano. The idea was to connect this elaborate device to the bass drum pedal so the lights would flash in time to what I hesitate to call the music. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this in principle apart from the fact that our fifth number, an ill-advised stab at Black Sabbath’s ‘Solitude’, featured me on bass and vocals and therefore no drums at all. If K–Tel ever put together a compilation album called Now That’s What I Call Music to Burn Coffins By, Volume One or The Most Thoroughly Depressing Album in the World . . . Ever, then side one, track one will be Black Sabbath’s ‘Solitude’. Why we decided to subject people to this suicidal dirge is a mystery to me now, although it does contain only two chords, which probably made us feel reasonably confident about getting through it. Even we realised, though, that to subject people to this suicidal dirge in total darkness was not what you might call a guaranteed winner. There was even, given the satanic nature of the Sabbath oeuvre, the risk of an outbreak of junior devil worship. The last thing we wanted was to turn the lights back on to find that a young virgin, of which there were plenty to hand, had been ritually sacrificed on the buffet table by a demonically possessed Barry Halpern.

  If we’d had a way of getting in touch with Roger Waters or Dave Gilmour out of Pink Floyd, we could have asked for some advice on what to do with the special effects to keep the audience awake during the dull bits. Unfortunately their numbers weren’t in the Bolton phone book, which, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise they wouldn’t be. Members of a big band like that were bound to be ex-directory. Thankfully, Guy Farringdon, the clever one, showed the ingenuity and leadership that’s made him the wealthy entrepreneur he is today: ‘For Christ’s sake, just get someone else to work the lights, then,’ he shrieked with a hint of the frustration that is inevitable when it finally dawns on you that you’re involved with people you wouldn’t trust to sit the right way round on the toilet.

  Accordingly my corpulent cousin Bernie Ryman sat next to the drum-kit operating the Lostock Illuminations throughout the gig. To those of us in the know, this was the perfect solution, but his presence in the line-up only added to the audience’s growing sense of bewilderment. Because Bernie’s entire responsibilities entailed pressing a small pedal, as far as the paying public were concerned there was a blond-bobbed lard-arse in a Suzi Quatro T-shirt sitting centre stage tapping his foot. This, of course, was long before Andrew Ridgely and Bez had been invented, so the concept of having a member of the band who doesn’t do anything was still uncharted territory. As if this wasn’t bad enough for the rotund Ryman, our technical wizard Davey Bright had unwittingly wired the apparatus so that each contact of the pedal discharged a small blast of electric current through the operator’s blubbery leg. No wonder he looked miserable, although not as miserable as Jerry Lumley, who’d been uninvolved in the great lighting debate as he had other things on his mind. And on the back of his underpants. In later life Davey Bright became the safety officer for a factory in Nottingham. For the sake of the work-force, I hope his knowledge of circuitry improved.

  Still, we had sound, we had light and the mid-set wrist-slitting interlude was over. Playing our remaining four songs at ever-increasing tempo in a desperate rush for the bar (me), the lavatory (Jerry Lumley), the fuse box (Davey Bright), Pippa Johnson’s pants (Guy Farringdon) and the Bolton Royal Infirmary casualty department (Bernie ‘Rubberlegs’ Ryman), we hurtled through Status Quo’s ‘Big Fat Mama’ and David Bowie’s ‘Gene Jeanie’, before hurriedly climaxing with ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Summertime Blues’. As a grand finale the Eddie Cochran standard was a particularly bad move. Most of our songs were only sporadically subjected to Eric’s artillery bombardment; in ‘Summertime Blues’ he opened fire indiscriminately, pausing only for the celebrated chorus breaks. The by-now-zombified audience’s lasting memory of the Berlin Airlift was thus

  ‘KERRAAAAAANNG . . . KERRRTHRONNNG . . .

  KERRDDDUUUNG . . . KERRRBLLINNGG . . .

  Ain’t no cure for the summertime blues . . .

  KRREENNGGG . . . KRRROINNGGG . . .

  KKRRUUNGGG . . . KERRRPLAAAANNNG . . .

  followed by me shouting ‘Thank you, Lostock, you’ve been a wonderful audience – Colin, your mum’s waiting in the Chevette outside – we’re the Berlin Airlift . . . goodnight’, followed by Bernie Ryman shouting ‘Jesus Christ, my bloody leg’s on fire.’

  We didn’t get an encore. I think this was because it was past the curfew for live music, what with it being nine forty-five and everything.

  Six months on from this auspicious début Guy left Bolton to go to a posh school down south. After much soul searching we decided we couldn’t carry on without him, principally because he was taking his AC30 with him, although we later betrayed him by re-forming with some blokes who had part shares in a Selmer valve amp. During those intervening months we would rehearse sporadically, improve marginally and perform occasionally at such celebrated rock venues as Bolton Lads’ Club, Eagley Tennis Club and, most legendary of all, the Parochial Hall on Markland Hill, which sadly for the legions of would-be sightseers has long since been sacrilegiously demolished.

  Davey Bright eventually found the confidence to turn his bass guitar on, Jerry Lumley never owned an amplifier and Bernie Ryman never came to see us again. Some of our other gigs drew less embarrassingly small crowds, some of our gigs were less plagued with technical hitches and teeth-jarring bum notes, but we never felt our nerve ends, or in Jerry’s case sphincter muscles, tingle again like they did that first night.

  2

  Billy Moon

  Shortly after the demise of the Berlin Airlift (Mark I) we began to go and watch proper gigs, and the first two were Judas Priest and David Bowie. Both would prove to have a powerful effect on our plans for future world domination, although for profoundly different reasons.

  For the uninitiated, and think yourselves lucky, Judas Priest are a leather-clad, ham-fisted, club-footed heavy-metal band of no fixed ability from the West Midlands. Moderately successful in the Walsall area, they inexplicably became a platinum-selling act in America in the late seventies and early eighties, particularly in those states whose only function appears to be keeping inter
esting states further apart on the map. You’d have thought life in a one-horse-trough town in the backwoods of Iowa was bad enough without listening to Judas Priest as well.

  The Priest, as we people who’ve never met them in our lives insist on calling them, have come to be remembered principally for a couple of things. Their lead singer was called Rob Halford. With a perfectly healthy interest in Satan, leather and the odd sad wing of destiny, Rob Halford would be your average everyday gravel-throated rock vocalist but for the fact that he’s bald. The man is a roll-on deodorant in leathers. Personally I’ve always felt sorry for the follicularly challenged in heavy metal because headbanging without luxuriant tresses is one of the funniest things you’ll see outside of a Jimmy Nail concert. Everyone has at some point seen a third-rate metal band rocking out, biker boots propped up on the monitors, with the lead singer tossing his leonine mane, the two guitarists trading licks in a blur of poodle perms, Louis XIV flailing away behind the drum-kit and the rapidly thinning bass player’s comb-over dangling sweat-soaked at the side of his head like a drizzle-drenched windsock at some God-forsaken disused aerodrome off the A1. If you want proof, get some early videos of Saxon, although you’ll spare yourself a lot of unpleasantness if you just take my word for it. Obviously conscious of his lack of cool, the Uncle Fester-like Rob Halford at one time decided to give himself a bit of stage presence by cruising on to the concert platform astride his beloved Harley Davidson. This went well until the night he confused the brake for the throttle and, roaring majestically from the wings stage right, failed to stop majestically stage centre, instead roaring less than majestically straight off stage left, where a collision with a disgruntled monitor engineer called Spike awaited. Top-flight comedy.