Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody Page 6
Week after week we trooped along there to see the same old pageant played out on a concert platform bathed in the glow of oil wheels. Another prerequisite for any serious space-rock co-operative, the oil wheel was a revolving disc of multicoloured goo through which a beam of light was directed at the turn. The same effect can be achieved by vomiting into a slide projector. A normal evening’s events would start with the oil wheels flickering into life as a variety of squeaks, farts and an enema-inducing bass rumble emanated from the speakers. For a while it would be unclear if the band had started or if demolition work was being undertaken near by. After several minutes a character resembling Baldrick in a flying helmet holding a euphonium would waddle up to the microphone and say, ‘Hi, we’re Icarus’s Ballbag from the pig fields of Benelux, and this is our oratorio for abused Mother Earth – it’s called “Psycho Sacrilege Sinfonietta”.’ At this point there would be a mass awakening of hibernating hairies who would rush towards the stage to move their arms like tree branches in a stiff breeze. This made a swift return to the bar extremely hazardous.
Of all the bands in this illustrious company, by far the most revered were Hawkwind. They portrayed themselves as hippy-dippy space cowboys travelling to distant galaxies in search of new worlds which were free from capitalist greed and abundantly blessed with magic mushrooms. Well, that all sounds perfectly reasonable, but imagine future generations spending myriad light years traversing the cosmos to touch down on a lush, verdant planet only to find that Hawkwind had got there first. It would be like Hillary and Tensing hauling themselves to the peak of Everest only to find two pensioners in collapsible chairs sitting alongside a dormobile. Nevertheless, if we’re talking about the ingredients a band needed to impress the teenage impressionable, then Hawkwind had them all. They not only had a bald bloke, Del Dettmar, and an unusual instrument, something called an audio generator manned by one Dik Mik, but they also had the greatest dancer of them all in Stacia. Stacia was a woman from Exeter who impressed us enormously with her elaborate make-up, exotic costumes and expressive choreography. What impressed us even more enormously, though, were her enormous and impressively bare breasts, which she jiggled about during the performance. It was a tonic and no mistake. As if all this wasn’t enough to command the utmost awe and respect, they had a resident poet in the late Robert Calvert, a sci-fi guru in Michael Moorcock, a genuine rock god in commander Dave Brock and a crater-faced grebo rock’n’roll icon in legendary bass player, Lemmy.
One of the other things that Stocky and I thought was wonderful about Hawkwind was the amount of equipment they had. As far as we were concerned, the more gear a band brought with them, the better they were. Hawkwind had a kit with double bass drums, synthesisers with patch bays like antiquated telephone exchanges, amplifiers the size of Welsh dressers and breasts the size of space hoppers. They were the biggest, barest, baldest, barmiest, beardiest band to bowl over BIT since Black Oak Arkansas. We’d seen the future and that future was space rock. With me and Mark and Stig and Paul in place already, despite the fact that the other two were several hundred miles away cooking dead rats in pond water and had once described Hawkwind as ‘the biggest bunch of shitheads in the world’, we just needed a violinist, a bassoonist, a projectionist, a pianist who’d be prepared to have his head shaved and a female gymnast with a burgeoning interest in naturism, and we’d be in business. I had Pippa Johnson pencilled in as the exotic dancer, but as the contents of her bra were still a promised land I’d yet to visit, the idea that she was going to put her bosom on display in the back room of the Black Dog at Belmont and swing it in the general direction of the mild-sipping regulars while the rest of us indulged in a bout of extended rifferama seemed optimistic, to say the least. As things turned out, she never got the opportunity. If I had become her Svengali, her life might have turned out very differently and instead of living with a captain of European industry in a period house in Hertfordshire she could well have had a regular lap-dancing engagement at Tonge Moor Labour Club. The reason her career in showbusiness remained unexplored and our cohort of cosmic crusties unrecruited was from Canvey Island in Essex and it was called Dr Feelgood.
Stig and Paul had returned from their desert camp and had suggested going to see this band called Dr Feelgood who were appearing on Saturday at BIT. We’d never heard of them, which was no great surprise, because we’d never heard of most of the bands who appeared there. In fact I’m convinced some of those crumhorn-wielding Flemish swineherds were just blokes from Bury who hadn’t quite mastered English but had realised that if you called yourselves Undulating Camembert or Captain Nemo’s Heaving Buttocks or Ogg and said you were big in Luxemburg, you’d get a well-paid gig and a good night out. Of course, pulling this off hinged on pretending you were Belgian, which is a bridge too far for most people – but acid is a very potent drug.
Arriving in front of the familiar stage that night, our first reaction was one of crushing disappointment. The great gods Hawkwind had taught us to gauge the worth of a band by the tonnage of their equipment, which had to mean that this Dr Feelgood were the worst group in the world, not counting the ones we’d been in. Centre stage was a white drum-kit consisting of four drums and three cymbals. Pathetic. Where were the gongs, the glockenspiels and the goatskin timpani? Either side of this feeble display were single amplifiers the size of an average suitcase. But where were the Marshall four-by-twelves and the Ampeg bass bins and the rotating Leslie cabinets? This lot were obviously rubbish. Even the industrial skip-sized PA has been replaced with four paltry-looking Wem columns. We seriously considered the possibility of going home before the band even started, so convinced were we that the impending show was going to be rotten.
When the four members of the band walked on stage, we knew our preconceptions were right. Instead of the usual formation of crushed-velvet robed druids moving slowly across the stage, we were confronted with two wiry geezers sporting short haircuts evidently styled with Spear & Jackson hedge clippers and suits which appeared to have been cut for two even wirier geezers sometime in the 1950s. It was a look we’d seen before, but only on psychiatric patients or junior bank clerks. Behind them, on bass and drums, were two burly blokes in bad sports jackets who resembled a pair of ageing boozers who’d been recruited from the local taproom, which, we later discovered, is exactly what they were.
From the very first song it became apparent that our lives had changed and very much for the better, at that. The two thickset bricklayers at the back, John B. Sparks on bass and inexcusable moustache, and the aptly named Big Figure on drums and unpleasantly pomaded hair, set off at a fierce pace which belied their corpulence. Up front, the singer Lee Brilleaux began to twitch as he forced out his gravelly bark while the psychotic guitarist Wilko Johnson charged with faltering footsteps across the stage like an inebriated navvy being chased by marauding skinheads. We’d never heard anything like it before. Short, punchy, soulful songs performed at a hundred miles an hour by four twitching care-in-the-community candidates. The energy they put into their performance was a real awakening for us, which wasn’t altogether surprising as with most of the bands we saw it was difficult to tell whether the members were asleep or not, especially the ones on the chaises longues. With the Feelgoods, as we soon came to lovingly refer to them, it was like someone had turned on a single brilliant white bulb which cut through all the oil wheels we’d ever seen. The songs they played were rhythm and blues standards like ‘Route 66’ and ‘Walking the Dog’, interspersed with Johnson originals such as ‘She Does It Right’ and ‘Roxette’. I’d never heard any of them before, but they all sounded like classics to me. They played for what I estimate to have been about forty-five minutes, which for Hawkwind meant two songs, or possibly three of their snappier ones. In that time they rattled through a good fifteen numbers, during which we remained transfixed. After the gig it became clear that space rock had been jettisoned for ever:
‘Jesus Christ, Stig, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.�
�
‘Dead right. Shall we get some skinny suits tomorrow?’
The following Saturday, Stig and I met in town and as well as buying outfits from Oxfam we got Dr Feelgood’s début mono album, Down by the Jetty, and set about a wholesale pilfering of the sound to kick-start Zoot Suit and the Zeroids. To say they were a profound influence on us would be less truthful than saying we nicked their whole act, not only because we loved the music but because we recognised that being four ungainly misfits with ill-fitting suits and mental-institution regulation hairdos was a pretty realistic aspiration.
Listening to the taut, scratchy sound of that record now, it’s hard to imagine what an impact it had on young impressionable ears tuned entirely to progressive rock. For the first time, we realised that a two-minute staccato burst of speed-spiked soul communicated more emotion than a pomp concept trilogy ever could. Dr Feelgood cured our addiction to prog, and music was never the same for us again. That album came out in 1975. The following summer we started to hear about this thing called ‘punk rock’, and that’s a sequence of events that is by no means unconnected, to my mind.
One Saturday morning in 1994 I picked up the newspapers from behind the door to find the front pages dominated by the tragic suicide of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Shocking though that event was, the same editions contained news of another untimely rock’n’roll demise which, though it appeared several pages away from the leader columns and banner headlines, hit me much harder. Lee Brilleaux had succumbed to lymphoma, aged forty-one. I’d like to say here and now that Lee was a hero to me, and every band I’ve ever been in since that night at BIT has been in some way influenced by Dr Feelgood, which out of all the testimonies his family, friends and fans have heard must rank as easily the least important.
Towards the end of 1976, Zoot Suit and the Zeroids split up. The ‘build ’em up, knock ’em down’ attitude of the music press is well known, and their callous lack of interest in the fragmentation of the Zeroids does their tarnished reputation no good at all. With a few favourable column inches we could have been the best-loved British sax-based R’n’B act since the Extremely Average White Band. That those plaudits never came is to the eternal disgrace of the staff of the New Musical Express, and I just hope they can live with themselves amid the detritus of shattered schoolboy dreams. In their defence, it could be argued that they couldn’t very well be held responsible for the break up of a band they’d never heard of. What a pathetic line of defence that is, Your Honour. If those seasoned hacks failed to keep their ears to the ground to anticipate vibrant new cultural forces, then that’s tantamount toadmitting gross negligence in my book (i.e., this one). In any case, I find it hard to believe that our concerted publicity campaign could have gone unnoticed even by the most blinkered of rock journalists. For our gig at the Crown in Horwich we not only put posters up in the Venture Scouts’ hut and the sixth-form common room, but also made sure it was in the classified adverts section of the parish magazine. If lazy features editors at Melody Maker can’t be bothered to check out rival publications, then the future for new music in this country looks as bleak as it did for the disillusioned Zeroids, whose bleak future was thankfully already behind them at that point.
There are those who will say that as the era of punk dawned the voice of music journalism was steeped in a cynical polemic which has been diluted over the years, and that our combo would provoke much greater interest if it were plying its trade today. I think I can disprove this with some authority. During the exhaustive research for this book, I phoned the NME and asked to be put through to the news desk. After first having to hold for the best part of forty-five seconds, I was connected to a female member of staff who adopted a rather snooty tone:
‘Yes, sir, how may I help you?’
Honestly, the arrogance of these people. Why did she assume she was in a position to help me when in fact it was I, armed with a hot rock of a story that her paltry publication had thus far failed to report, who was much better placed to help her. Still, being a reasonable man I kept my cool:
‘I’ve got an exclusive for your news page, you toffee-nosed cow.’
Redial buttons are a wonderful feature of the contemporary telephone, don’t you think? This time my call was dealt with by a brusque sort of bloke who simply barked ‘News desk’ when he answered. I mean, really, if these people are incapable of adopting a code of simple manners and politeness, then they should sod off and crawl up a dead bear’s bum. Anyway, cordial as ever, I persevered:
‘I’ve got an exclusive for your news page, cock.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Zoot Suit and the Zeroids have split up.’
‘Who?’
‘Zoot Suit and the Zeroids.’
‘I’ve never heard of them. When was this?’
‘1976.’
‘Who is this?’
Isn’t it marvellous that by putting the digits 141 in front of your call you can conceal the number from which you’re dialling? What a triumph for our modern telecommunications network. British Telecom, I salute you in your diligence. What a pity we can’t pat the music press on the back in the same way. They are as rude, arrogant, aloof and badly informed as ever, and are probably the offspring of cockney barrow boys who sell Tower of London snowstorms at extortionate prices to Japanese tourists who’ve stumbled on one of these East End street markets in the Port O’Bellow Road. It gives me no great pleasure to dish the dirt like this, but I’ve given them several chances to get their act together and they’ve failed every time. What’s more, I think the scientific study I’ve mounted, the findings of which I’ve meticulously documented above, will prove that these criticisms are based on genuine empirical evidence and not the bitter ramblings of a rock’n’roll nobody.
Apart from the vicious disregard shown by the press, there were a number of other factors at play in the splintering of the Zeroids. Stocky was still without an amplifier to call his own. We forgave him on the grounds of his professed poverty, but when he passed his driving test and turned up in a newly purchased powder-blue Triumph Spitfire we began to question his commitment. The Triumph Spitfire was a car for posers operating on a tight budget in as much as it looked like a sports car but was considerably cheaper than the real thing. The powder-blue Triumph Spitfire was a car for posers operating on a tight budget who had no sense of pride or style and were most probably colour-blind as well. I think what hurt us most about this transition from boss bassman to boy racer was the wholly inappropriate nature of his chosen vehicle. Transport to gigs was always a problem and, in the unlikely event of him ever getting his own equipment, there was no way it was ever going to fit in his toytown dragster without first removing the roof, seats and driver.
In addition, he began to talk of his ambition to become an accountant, which as far as we were concerned was about as uncool as it was possible to be. If you were in a band, you didn’t worry about money. After the music, you cogitated on the mythical rock’n’roll lifestyle of fast cars (which ruled out Triumph Spitfires), private planes, vintage champagne, loose women and loose bowels. Of course, most young rockers who embark on this course find themselves eighteen months later back in their council flats in Dagenham with nothing to show for the platinum sales of their début album in the States but an irksome stomach ulcer and the number of some old slapper in Sausalito. Meanwhile in St Lucia, the accountant who administered the band’s finances is enjoying fast cars, private planes, vintage champagne and loose women till he’s purple in the face. Perhaps old Stocky was right all along.
On top of these worrying signs we had another problem to contend with. I’d managed to complete an academic record remarkable only for its lack of remarkability with three unremarkable A-level grades in English, geography and economics. Thanks to some feverish activity in the clearing system, I had managed to obtain a place to study English, American studies and classical civilisation at university. This was going to involve leaving home and moving into student accommodation in Man
chester. Initially I’d decided to relocate to the deepest south of England, just to experience the culture shock and learn the language, but my results didn’t come up to scratch and so I had to abandon plans to emigrate to Nottingham. However, I was determined to live in the halls of residence and began to look on the close proximity to Bolton as a positive advantage. Not only was it easier to take my washing home, but we could keep the band going if I travelled back on a regular basis for rehearsals. Stig and Paul weren’t so sure. They thought a band should be a local posse going to the same pubs, clubs and gents’ outfitters as each other and that our gang mentality would suffer if we had to be separated by long distances. This seemed unnecessarily dramatic to me, especially as I was only moving eleven miles away. Even though several members live on different continents, Def Leppard manage to keep going. I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a good thing, but they’ve shown more staying power than Stig or Paul, who I began to suspect were looking for a reason to bail out. Paul, in particular, had kept his distance since that party at his house when I inadvertently lost my tea and several pints of Merrydown over his mum’s slippers. Come on, we’ve all done it. In any case, I wasn’t about to throw away the chance of three years of state-subsidised hedonism for the prospect of a Tuesday night residency at the Gardener’s Arms.
4
Ridiculous and Jones
So it was that I set off to seek my fortune in the big city with a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted on a stick over my shoulder, which made carrying two suitcases extremely difficult. In principle, Zoot Suit and the Zeroids were still intact, but we were never to play together again, which must have been very distressing for our faithful followers to whom I now apologise unreservedly. Sorry, Tex. Sorry, Bong.