Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  ‘All right, we’ll put your mates on the playlist.’

  ‘My mates? They played on my roadshow but I don’t really know them.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. We’ll stick it on the C list for you.’ The C list was the bottom rung of the playlist.

  ‘You’re not doing it for me, you’re doing it for a couple of talented singer-songwriters.’

  ‘OK, we’ll see what happens, shall we?’

  What happened? The song went top three and Charlie and Craig Reid, the Proclaimers, had a string of hit singles and albums spanning twenty years.

  Job done at Portobello, we headed north to Arbroath and then across to the west coast. 130 miles of fabulous scenery which necessitated regular stops to scribble poetry. By the time we reached Helensburgh the poem was finished.

  From the shores of far Loch Lomond,

  Over Rowardennan Forest,

  Foothills of the Drum of Clashore,

  Feed the tumbling burns that bind them.

  Coursing like the blood of demons

  From the dark of Lochard Forest,

  Forging like Buchanan smithy,

  New-born shapes of infant rivers,

  Snaking north of young Buchlyvie,

  On past Cauldhame, on past Kippen,

  Under greying summer heavens.

  Gracefully by Church of Scotland,

  Nether Gorse and Patrickson,

  The sleepy Forth creeps past the high-stacked

  Yellow hayfields of Gargunnock.

  At various times during the week I’d made a point of telling a couple of Smiley’s sidekicks how the water in Loch Lomond was so pure that you could drink it. I let the fact permeate. I bided my time. When we arrived at the loch I let the conversation drift naturally towards the quality of the water.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to drink that,’ said my producer, right on cue.

  ‘It won’t hurt you. £20 says you won’t drink a glass of it.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  It was going according to plan. Someone had passed on my false knowledge to Smiley that the water was absolutely pure.

  ‘Twenty quid? I’ll do it.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Give me a glass.’

  One glass. Into the water. Out of Loch Lomond and into Smiley. ‘No problem. Twenty quid please.’

  I paid up, but the psychological fun I had, when he learned that it was no different from any normal lake water with its animal matter, dead fish, rotting plants and things unmentionable, was worth £20 of anybody’s money. He asked serious questions of his internal plumbing for the next two or three days.

  At Helensburgh we stayed by Gare Loch, but I resisted pulling the same trick twice and instead got my old pal Stuart Henry on the phone from Luxembourg, much to the delight of the crowd, as he’d done the roadshow here many years earlier. He enjoyed being there in spirit.

  I saved the week’s physical stunt for the final day at Ayr. After interviewing former Small Faces singer Steve Marriott, I set about Smiley. On stage we discussed his new many-wheeled roadshow vehicle. ‘Many-wheeled, yes, Smiley,’ I said, ‘but not many-tyred.’

  The crowd parted to show his truck sans tyres. Storm clouds spread over his usually sunny countenance. Something that sounded uncannily like ‘You bastard’ issued from his lips.

  The local Air Sea Rescue had played ball. Their helicopter rose on cue, flew out to sea and dropped six tyres into the ocean. Smiley was livid. He was steaming. I’d be receiving a bill that very evening. The crowd roared their approval. At the stunt that is, not the impending invoice. He was so angry that it was a struggle to get him back on stage for the finale.

  ‘Wait a minute, Smiles, how the heck did that happen?’ I pointed. The crowd parted again. The tyres were back on the vehicle. He’d been living on anger and adrenalin for the last hour, now he was a broken man. His tyres had been safe all along, those dropped into the sea being throwaways. The Air Sea Rescue later recovered them as part of an exercise. Unfortunately, in these straitjacketed days of health and safety no one would be allowed to even entertain such an idea.

  Weston-Super-Mare was always fun. The lovely Hilda (some eighty-plus years young) would turn up with cakes and presents. I’d make a point of getting her up on stage as she was a real hit with the crowd and bought records to help the groups who appeared on the roadshow even though she didn’t own a record player. She always got a lot of press and would call me her favourite DJ. Radio One really was a family station then, broadcasting and not narrowcasting.

  In Weston we always stayed at the Atlantic Hotel, where on one occasion I organised for Smiley’s room to be changed. A pretty feeble wheeze? Hold hard. I moved every single item to another room but put them all in exactly the same place they had been in his original room. Reception even swapped his key, which wouldn’t work for the old room but opened the new room. A bewildered Smiley asked anyone and everyone, including reception, which room he’d been in and, being well briefed, they all played along. He began to question his sanity, something the rest of us had been doing for some while. As any decent oceanographer knows the tide scoots in pretty rapidly at Weston, so during this diversion with the rooms, we’d appropriated his car keys and moved the Range Rover onto the beach. When this was pointed out to him at an appropriate moment he broke several British sprint records in one panic-stricken burst of speed, hitherto unknown in the Miles family. It was terrific viewing from our grandstand seat in the hotel. Through the waves he ploughed as the surf broke over the top of his wheels, but there was icing on the cake for us voyeurs. He fumbled with his keys and … they fell into 2 feet of incoming tide. We couldn’t see the expression on his face as he dropped to his knees and thrashed around in desperation, but we didn’t need to.

  Weston is also tinged with a sad memory. At each town we were expected to be available for local press interviews and on this occasion I was asked to give an interview to a local reporter out on the seafront. It was one of her first interviews and although she professed to being a little nervous, she was actually pretty confident and very professional. We sat on the railings, did the interview and had a good laugh until some half an hour later Paul Williams appeared, shouting from the hotel doorway that it was time to eat. I asked my interviewer if she wanted to join the crew for supper where she could get a few more views on how the roadshow ran and even try to interview Paul. She said she’d love to join us, but then decided she’d better get back and write up the interview. It had been one of Jill Dando’s earliest assignments and years later she admitted that she desperately wanted to come and have a laugh with us but realised that she had absolutely no money and if she’d been asked to pay for her dinner would have been acutely embarrassed.

  Summer 1988 got underway at Great Yarmouth, and it was while driving from there to Skegness that I stopped at an intriguing junk shop in a small hamlet. It was crammed with everything from stuffed parrots and milking stools to hundreds of paintings and piles of old furniture. Not knowing where to start on this alluring Aladdin’s cave of things that I couldn’t possibly fit in the car, I made straight for an old photo album. I have no idea what made me select that item out of the thousands arrayed before me, but I opened it to find that it contained the relatives of an early girlfriend of mine, Gillie Palmer. There was her grandmother as a young girl in an Edwardian landscape, early cars, family gatherings and many other atmospheric images. They were astounded when I presented them with the long-lost photo album.

  Obviously buoyed up by my find I later screeched to a halt in the middle of nowhere. My subconscious had registered something a mile or two back. I turned the car round and re-traced my journey. What the hell could it have been? Then I spotted the sign: ‘Ferrets for sale’. A gift from roadshow Heaven. The following day they made their public debut. Come to think of it. I’m not sure whether there should be an ‘l’ in ‘public’ as the little chaps went down Smiley’s shorts. If you think he struggled, you should have seen the ferrets. The crowd pleas
er of the furry duet brought the roadshow attendees to their feet as it pushed down Smiley’s zip and poked its head out. You couldn’t have written the script.

  At Bridlington Captain Sensible and I battled it out for hours one evening on the crazy golf. No hedonistic orgy of personal destruction for us. We knew how to have fun. A pair of white shorts each, a pot of tea and an old-fashioned seaside town and we were flying. Brand us pleasure-seeking sybarites if you must. I recently wrote a rather decent song with the Captain, the lyric failing, rather significantly, to make any reference to Bridlington.

  At Cleethorpes Boating Lake Paddock Smiley hired a huge crane which gently and elegantly lowered my green MGB into said boating lake. After being dunked like an oversized green digestive it re-emerged with water pouring from every orifice. Fair enough; after all I’d had a hairdresser attempt to dye Smiley’s hair blond the previous day and it had turned the colour of my car. I can understand a high level of peevishness dominating his vengeful thoughts. I then brought forth an Indian elephant called Bully, which Smiles was forced to ride, but I was subsequently attacked by six tarantulas. It’s a wonder we had time to play any music.

  On the way there I’d phoned ahead to a garden centre. I began explaining my simple needs.

  ‘That could only be Mike Read.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone else who’d ask us to turn a hotel room into a beautiful garden.’

  Fair point. The target this time was producer Ted Beston, who’d had the misfortune to be assigned to this roadshow week. Not being my usual producer, Ted had obviously drawn the short straw. While the garden centre got busy turning his room into an exhibit worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show, we staged a lengthy game of rounders on the beach. Nicky Campbell was with us, and if I’m not mistaken, it was his wicked swing of the bat that Smiley took on with his face. The bat won and an ambulance was called. As they wheeled him up the beach Ted called an end to the game. Knowing that we desperately needed more time for the completion of the garden, Smiley, ever the trooper, spat blood as he insisted, ‘No, no you must carry on, carry on … in my name.’ A little melodramatic, I felt. I mean, he wasn’t exactly slipping away having copped a packet in the trenches. We stretched the game out for as long as we could. It was enough. The front pages of the local and regional papers carried photographs of a beautifully turfed room with wall-to-wall grass, flowerpots a blaze of colour, hanging baskets, ferns, small trees and a wee herbaceous border. The only discordant colour came from the bruises on Smiley’s face.

  With all our banging about, worms started to emerge from the turf. It was time to go. ‘What do I do about all this?’ asked Ted, not unreasonably.

  We shrugged, made our excuses and left.

  In 1989 I did the Welsh stretch, which involved fire engines, several tons of foam and a few hundredweight of greengrocery. As was often the case, I had no idea the night before what I was going to get up to the following day. David Essex was one of the guests at Porthcawl, so I raced through the local paper, tracked down a motorcycle dealership and hired a Harley-Davidson. I knew that David loved bikes, but there had to be more to it than that. I called the coastguard, who readily agreed to let me have half-a-dozen distress flares. A path was cleared through the middle of the 25,000-strong crowd, a makeshift ramp placed against the stage and right on cue, after Adrian Juste’s famous announcement, ‘Today, live from Porthcawl’ etc., David kicked the engine into life and with me riding pillion and letting off the flares, we tore through the crowd at speed, hit the ramp and screeched to a halt on the stage. A dangerous but great start. It wouldn’t get off the drawing board in these days of caution and litigation. The end was more prolonged as Smiley, much to the delight of the crowd, removed the engine from my car, delaying my departure to the next venue by several hours.

  That week in Wales was equally memorable for the look of despair my producer, John Leonard, gave me as, head in hands, he whispered in a rather defeated tone, ‘What … are the flock of sheep for?’ What were they for? Well, obviously, for a perfectly innocent sheep-shearing demonstration. He didn’t even bother asking about the enormous sheep dip that arrived and the blokes that did the shearing. The paramedics prescribed a week or two in a rest home where he could tend the marigolds, sit on a bench and mumble away to himself about what life could have been like before the invention of roadshows. Bring on the flock. Into the bath of sheep dip. Shearing demonstration. Any more sheep. No, but there’s Smiley. The 20,000-strong crowd were well aware of this inevitable conclusion and, like a crowd of toga-swathed Romans at the Colosseum, were baying for blood. Who was I to deny them? I turned my thumb down Caesar style and Smiley was duly dipped and shorn.

  Smiley and I regularly spent far more money than we earned setting up elaborate stunts, and I intended the 1990 week, covering East Anglia and the south east, to get off to a flying start. For my birthday earlier that year, a friend had mocked up some silly photos of me on other people’s bodies. Being visual, you’ll have to take my word that it was well executed. One had my head superimposed on the semi-naked body of a female mud-wrestler. Perhaps I should choose my friends more carefully, but I was retrospectively grateful. For the roadshow, I simply intended to swap my head for Smiley’s. I paid someone I knew, with the wherewithal, to do just that and deliver the picture to the national newspaper that had agreed to run with it. I childishly rubbed my hands with glee. I’d turn up at Great Yarmouth and in Monday’s paper would be the story I’d provided with the photograph. Easy. That story said that Smiley formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Yes, that’s right, ‘Mud, mud, Gloria Smudd’. Of course it went wrong. The lazy oaf to whom I’d entrusted the job delivered the original, with Smiley’s head loosely stuck on top of the old photograph. The tabloid (all right, it was the Daily Star) leapt on it of course. That morning’s edition carried the story that I had formerly wrestled as Gloria Smudd. Damn. Never fear, a good commander always has a back-up plan and this one was the business.

  I had obtained forms for joining the Army and when I arrived at the Dolphin Hotel in Great Yarmouth on the Sunday night, I revealed the plot to a willing employee. ‘Army forms. Carbon paper. Autograph paper on top. When Mr Miles arrives ask him for his autograph. I’ll pre-sign it and so will our producer so it looks kosher.’ It worked. Some 10,000 or so, gathered on Great Yarmouth beach to watch the antics, saw an unwilling and protesting Smiley being shown the forms to prove that he had enlisted of his own free will. ‘You can’t make me join the Army,’ he spluttered.

  ‘No, but these gentleman can.’

  A sergeant major with a face like a sheer slab of granite and two squaddies were the enforcers. To the delight of the crowd, Smiley was stripped of his own clothes and dressed in Army uniform. ‘I’m not staying in this. I’ll just go back to the hotel and change.’

  I had to disappoint him. ‘No point, Smiles, your clothes are long gone. You can have them back at the end of the week.’

  The three military types turned up all week to keep him in check. There was a proud moment at Clacton when we asked him to perform with some twenty other people in uniform. His smile turned to humiliation when he learned that they were Girl Guides and he had to sing ‘Ging Gang Gooley’ with them. We wouldn’t let him play with Aswad. Later we told him he’d be involved in a military tattoo. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind a military tattoo – a few bugles, plenty of flags…’

  ‘Er, no, Smiles … not that kind of military tattoo.’

  The squaddies stopped him from wriggling, squirming and squeaking while the tattooist went to work on Smiley’s bottom. It was terrific, crowd-pleasing stuff.

  In Margate the sergeant major rather decently, at my behest, allowed Smiles to hold the regimental mascot, a small pig. We also had Bob Geldof and his band on the show to play their new single, ‘The Great Song of Indifference’, and I was roped in to play guitar with them. While we were playing and the crowd were swaying, Smiles was holding the pig, but
the Army chaps had gone AWOL. Come the end of the roadshow and he’s still holding the pig. It’s OK, it was on a lead. He was now seriously looking to unload the pig on someone. No one wanted it. ‘Your responsibility, Smiles,’ I said, with a shrug of the shoulders. He said something that sounded like ‘bastard’. In fact it probably was ‘bastard’. It would make the most sense.

  The next show was in Eastbourne and the run there from Margate was certainly the longest between two venues in any one week. A local constable was on hand to forbid any attempt at abandoning the small creature and ‘shoving off.’ This was possibly the first little piggy to ride in a Radio One Range Rover. Better than a trip to market with your mates. Smiles tried to unload the pig at various Kent and Sussex farms, but of course, as he was a thoroughly untrustworthy character that could well have smuggled it in from Calais, no one would touch it. But by the time we arrived at Eastbourne there was a definite lack of pig. I suspect Smiley just turned him loose in a field, but I prefer my apocryphal ending, making use of an ancient schoolboy joke:

  Smiley arrives at the hotel with the pig.

  ‘You can’t bring that in here,’ says the receptionist.