Ain't Bad for a Pink

by Sandra Gibson

  There had been the customary wrangling over money. Being an entertainer, unless you are very famous, is still a low status profession. You usually have to wait for your money; sometimes it’s dependent on the size of the audience and there’s often vagueness about the amount – but never in my mind! For example, I started on £60-£70 at the Jazz Theatre in Chester, with the promise of more money if I was a success. One night the management let in a bus load of foreign tourists and Tom asked for more money. He was refused because the tourists had not been charged! So Tom, an ex-miner and a big union man, put an end to the arrangement and things came to a natural end. Not long after, I remade my relationship with Zoe.

  Tobacco Tins And Hot Rods

  Round about the time when every town had an Irish themed pub with pretend nicotine on the ceilings and wooden farm implements on the walls, I had a very brief career as a purveyor of Irish songs. Shortly after the charity gig at The Limelight ( circa 1994) an agent phoned me.

  “I hear you’re out of retirement. I can fill your diary.”

  “What with?”

  “Irish music.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “It’s £200 a night.”

  So I phoned Terry Fox: a good all-rounder, who sang, played fiddle and penny whistle – all the Celtic stuff – and Fluff, an excellent violin player who later joined the reformed Incredible String Band. I had done Irish songs in folk clubs so I wasn’t working in the dark.

  We did about eight gigs and hated it. The venues were awful and we didn’t really like the music. Neither did the punters! Really, the people wanted karaoke. At one dockside pub in Liverpool all the tables had tobacco tins on. No problem with that until you realized that the lids had been decorated with spent matches. This is something they do in jail to pass the time.

  Some of the best gigs come spontaneously or unexpectedly. One I particularly remember was upstairs at the Civic Hall, Nantwich about 1996. Loraine Baker (ex Boat Band and now with Baker’s Fabulous Boys) was on double bass and Fluff was on fiddle. Andy Boote was playing acoustic guitar and I was playing electric guitar quietly. It was like an acoustic Skunk Band. There were various aspects: country rock from me, jazz from Andy and Celtic roots from Fluff. It just flowed.

  I enjoyed performing with Jo Ann Kelly. She was an excellent slide guitarist and she didn’t half belt it out in her acoustic delta style. She was influenced by Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Jo Ann in turn influenced other female blues singers. She jammed with Canned Heat but declined the invitation to join the band, forming instead The Blues Band in 1979 with her brother Dave Kelly, Paul Jones – ex Manfred Mann – and the original Fleetwood Mac bassist Bob Brunning.

  Gary B. Goode and the Hot Rods were the resident band at Crewe’s mirror-balled Majestic Ballroom in the Sixties. They supported all the famous bands but the reason I admired them was because Keith Haines, my musical guru on the school bus, played for them. The kid who watched them then didn’t expect ever to play with them.

  Fast forward thirty-odd years. Gary B. Goode and the Hot Rods did a couple of reunions for charity then decided to do one for themselves. Keith is committed to his own musical interests and will only play rock ‘n’ roll for charity, so they asked me to play guitar in place of him and this opportunity made me realise what strength Keith contributed to the band.

  Dressing Room Talk: Fleetwood Mac

  Talking about stories that span the decades I supported Peter Green at Bar Cuba in Macclesfield round about 2004. He was the founder of Fleetwood Mac who left in 1970 and an excellent blues-rock guitarist – admired by Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. BB King said of him: “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” (36) BB King once asked Fleetwood Mac to play “Albatross” and then they invited him up to play with them. I was struck by the number of hits Peter Green had written as song after song was played: “Black Magic Woman”, “Man Of The World”, “The Green Manalishi” as well as “Albatross”.

  I went to his dressing room afterwards; the band members were all younger than Peter Green, as was his biographer. “Do you want a drink?” Peter asked. “Is the Pope a Catholic?” I replied. “Where’s the Jack Daniels?” asked Peter Green, who wasn’t drinking. “Say when.” “Next week,” I answered. Everyone laughed and the conversation flowed. Peter Green, who had sat in the audience, said he enjoyed my set. “You’ve seen it before in Manchester in the Sixties,” I replied. I had supported Fleetwood Mac at Alvaston Hall, Nantwich and at Manchester whilst I was at university. I went on to talk about a dressing room conversation I’d had with Jeremy Spencer, who had been playing fairly basic in E. I had shown him some open tuning techniques associated with the blues that not many people knew about at the time. There was a spark of recognition at this point and everyone agreed that I had triggered something in Peter Green’s memory but I don’t know what. As singer-songwriter and front man of Fleetwood Mac, extreme reaction to drugs had rendered him mentally incapable of remembering much of his earlier career and he was grateful to me for helping to restore something.

  The second phase of Fleetwood Mac – the Rumours era – initiated by drummer Mick Fleetwood, is the Fleetwood Mac everyone knows but Peter Green is remarkable. Sadly enough, there were fewer people there to see him than to see me on that occasion.

  The following week the biographer came to my shop: he had a Dobro to sell and wanted to know if I had any more Peter Green stories.

  A Degree of Confrontation:

  Sound Systems, Kisses and Cleavers

  Parallel with the musical fecundity of the Skunk Band, my business was supplying sound systems for internationally famous bands all over England and Europe.

  Endangered Puddings

  There’s a constant struggle to get correct information before a gig and payment after a gig. I had organized a sound system for a band at The George at Burslem. I’d been reassured that they were not a punk band but when I arrived with the equipment I found they were, indeed, a punk band and therefore the sound system was not adequate for their needs. At the end of the gig their manager Michael Dempsey was reluctant to pay. The argument took place in a kitchen and, incensed by the injustice of the situation and the fact that I had been misled, I picked up a meat cleaver and hauled it at the wooden work bench, close enough to the manager to make my point. He paid up.

  In a similar vein I had two gigs booked in local Crewe and district hotels one New Year’s Eve. The second venue wanted me there just before the midnight festivities so it was a tight schedule. I finished the first gig and went to see the manager for my fee. The manager was arrogant and disrespectful: “Oh, I’m far too busy to deal with that now!” The exchange was taking place – once again – in the kitchen and I seized my moment – and a gravy boat. “How many of these puddings do you have spare?” I asked, waving the gravy boat in a menacing way. Then, to underline my point I poured gravy over one of the puddings awaiting delivery to table. He paid up.

  Displacing your anger into an object is a harmless way of making a threatening point.

  It’s still happening. Only recently, at a local folk festival there was an agreement that I should receive £150 for two sessions on consecutive nights. When the time came for payment there was a managerial vagueness about the fee. “£100, wasn’t it?” Fortunately, Zoe’s memory is extremely good and no meat cleaver was necessary. They paid up.

  Just Another Town Along The Way

  Sometimes, though, it was all too petty to bother with and I sublimated my anger in humour. I once supported The Edgar Broughton Band at the Bridge Street Arts Centre in Newcastle-under-Lyme in the Eighties. The audience was sparse and when Edgar Broughton, who had some acoustic numbers in his repertoire, heard me, he went and hid. At the end, when I went for my £75, the management only wanted to give me £35: the usual excuse – poor attendance. Furious, I threw it back at them and stormed off.

  Des picked it up.

  I c
alled the resulting tape: Live, Under Lyme and Underpaid.

  The Adverts

  But, going back to the Burslem gig: so impressed were these punks that they invited me to tour with them and be their sound engineer. The band in question were The Adverts and I met them just before they became famous. I did the sound systems for all their live performances. Gaye Advert played the bass, TV Smith was the singer-songwriter and Lorry Driver was the drummer. I remember the awful row they made and the pogoing and the glaucous waterfall of spit after every song and me and Des sitting experiencing this next generation of music with some bemusement.

  This group was formed in 1976 and within three months they were on tour with The Damned. “Looking through Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” was the hit they had in August 1977. It’s on Mojo magazine’s list of best punk singles. A suitably macabre subject: Gary Gilmore was on Death Row and insisting on the death penalty for himself. This song referred to the wishes of the murderer to donate his eyes to medical science. What gruesome scenes had they witnessed? The song created just the sort of controversy an up and coming punk group needed.

  Inappropriate Thrift

  Gaye was the bass player but we had to tune it up for her. Al Dean said to her,

  “These strings are knackered.”

  “But I only bought them last week!”

  “Yes but you bought them second hand!”

  Slim (Wayne Davies). (37)

  The Adverts were a well-regarded group; in addition to The Damned they supported Generation X, Slaughter and the Dogs and The Jam. When Annie Nightingale took over as host of The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978, The Adverts opened her first show. “At last: the 1978 Show!” said TV Smith – probably in reference to the Whistle Test’s failure so far to embrace punk. They did four sessions for John Peel on Radio One: two in 1977, one in 1978 and one in 1979 by which year it was all over. The Adverts split up after the death of their manager Mike Dempsey.

  Some punk bands were good; some diabolically bad but they all had raw energy. The Sex Pistols and The Boomtown Rats had talent and an eye for the main chance. The only way you can make a punk band sound good is to make it sound as bad as possible. You produce a wall of non-melodic sound and you pin the audience against the back wall with the blast. If you put a coat or a plastic glass on those speakers the vibration would send it two or three feet but these mad audiences would come to the front and put their heads inside the bass speaker cabinets!

  No-one in The Adverts could play but TV Smith who wrote some great songs including “Looking Through Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” now appears on Radio Four. His recent work is Dylanesque and I feel glad he is still out there doing it.

  Waterfalls Of Spit

  With punk events you were a little bit on your guard. They were all crazy - the audience as well. They all used to rush to the back of the hall then rush forward and crush one another. Things were always edgy. Buzzcocks had a very strange following. The Adverts - OK, Generation X - OK but the Buzzcocks - a bit wild. They used to encourage the audience to spit. It was like waterfalls everywhere. The cables had to be dried out with rags - fortunately there was no AIDS then - before we put them into the van.

  Wayne Davies (Slim). (38)

  On The Road

  Being constantly on the road, either doing gigs or doing sound systems we would meet up with other bands at transport cafes at unsocial hours. There were all sorts: people destined to become famous and some already well-known; averagely good bands and flavour-of-the-month bands; all on the road and tired and hungry. But no tribute bands in those days! You can tell a musician if you are a musician: it shows in dress, hair length, general aura, extreme fatigue and a few seconds of conversation. We would often end up talking about cooking or vintage cars or the architecture of a city, rather than about music. It’s the opposite of what you would expect. Little needs to be said about gigs because everyone has experienced mismatched audiences and technical horrors so unless there’s a really funny or terrible or sexy story there’s nothing to add. This is why Des and I don’t find Billy Connolly’s stories interesting: that sense of humour is in the back of every band’s transit van cruising down the motorways of Britain.

  Basic Requests And Poor Timekeeping

  I was involved in setting up sound systems for some high-profile bands. At that time Pete had a big PA – he’d designed it and we used to hire the sound system out. That was the punk era – there were lots of them – and they needed a big PA to make lots of noise. One of these bands had an outrageous girl: wild and liberated. She used to say things like, “Have you got some gaffer tape? I’ve just come on.”

  One night, at Barbarella’s – or it might have been The Longhouse – in Birmingham, this band had been due to go on fifteen minutes ago; everything was all set but Miss Gaffer Tape was nowhere to be seen. I looked in all the possible places for her and I looked again. Things were getting desperate – the crowd was yelling and stamping and the only possible place she could be was the toilet. I knocked on the door.

  “I’m having a shag and I’m not coming out till I’ve finished.”

  She was another quarter of an hour.

  Wayne Davies (Slim). (39)

  Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick

  I don’t know a musician that hasn’t got respect for Ian Dury and the Blockheads, whatever their taste in music. Dury was an artist (he studied under Peter Blake at the Royal College of Art) and a storyteller: his songs were vivid, witty stories told by an artist. He was aligned with the punk movement but his original band, Kilburn and the Highroads, was a very well thought of small band, not labelled as anything but good. Dury was also a polio victim and his drummer had only one leg; the whole band was characterised by courage and style, even in death. At his funeral the flowers were arranged to spell DUREX and he had a glass-sided Victorian coach with white horses.

  I met Ian Dury in transit and I admired his funny and sad storytelling songs. His music was in the rock genre, original and technically sound and you could hear the vocals. I liked the way they were done in an English dialect and rhyming slang, reminding me of the obscurities in some blues lyrics. He was asked to write the libretto for Cats but refused because he hated Lloyd Webber’s music and I applaud him for that.

  Des’ band supported Kilburn and the High Roads and I liked the Dagworth’s songs for the same reason: “Brixham Harbour” has a nice Englishness.

  Whores And Weed In Knightsbridge

  During this period of my life, I was quite well off. My association with Mike Dempsey, the manager of The Adverts, took me to some interesting places and he was my main source of contacts in those days. Dempsey had a great penthouse in Knightsbridge – very posh and built on various levels – and we were invited there. This would be about 1977. Well, we pulled up in our van and went through a cordon of press photographers and policemen. We thought they must be there because of The Adverts but it turned out to be another reason.

  A prostitute was being evicted.

  It was a big news story – she’d been having an affair with a well-known MP. Anyway once in the flat Mike offered me a very meagre amount of weed in a tin. “Wait a minute,” I said and I went through the cordon again, collected a carrier bag from the vehicle and went back in the flat. The world’s press was not interested in me and my mission. Good job. The carrier bag was full of weed: my slice of a harvest I had helped gather in! I distributed it.

  These good times only came to an end when my connection with Michael Dempsey was severed by his death, which inevitably curtailed my business.

  The Three Degrees: 1976 or 1977

  The lads phoned me. “Everything we’re doing’s wrong according to this man. He wants echo on this and that but he doesn’t have a stage sheet!” The manager of The Three Degrees was hassling the lads about the sound system. They were right to be upset: a set list with requirements set out at the side for special things like echo was essential. This manager was being unreasonable. I got into my 3 litre Volvo – a very impressive mode
l complete with all the refinements – and drove over to The Heavy Steam Machine in Hanley.

  The manager was a small slim black man in a salmon pink suit. I threatened him: “You’re the wrong size to shout at my lads like that! There’s only me shouts at my guys. Right lads: load up. Take the gear out.” Pink Suit stormed off to the Three Degrees’ dressing room, panicking and mouthing off and ridiculous. “Right lads – carry on.” The lads carried on with their job as if nothing had happened.

  The show went on and all went well. Afterwards the girls came and each and every one kissed me: “The best sound we’ve had all Europe.” They might as well have said it was the best sex in Europe, so tremendously pleased was I to have my work recognized. A rare occurrence in the business.

  The Three Degrees were attractive, sexy ladies; more than that: they had star quality. Unmistakeable.

  A fortnight later I received a similar phone call from the same venue: more trouble. Exasperated, I stormed over to Hanley and flung open the doors. It was dark inside: only the stage was lit and on the stage was the biggest man in the world. His arms were bigger than my legs. He was as big as Texas – complete with hat. I just looked up at him. “Do what you like,” I said. Then there was laughter. It was a wind-up. A very creative wind-up.