The Sound of Laughter

by Peter Kay

  Another night I was booked to DJ at a fiftieth for a fat woman called Jean, who claimed she was my aunt because she'd been to water aerobics twice with my mum. I arrived to find that the hire company had dropped off the equipment but had neglected to leave me any lights. After a few fruitless telephone calls and numerous answer-machine messages sprinkled with expletives, I had to resort to paying one of the bar staff a tenner of my own money just to sit by the door all night and keep flicking the light switch on and off in time to the music.

  The final straw came when I tried another hire company and turned up at the evening wedding reception to find that I had no power lead. They'd left me everything else except a power lead. With pains in my chest I frantically tried to track down a lead from somewhere while the bride, the groom and two hundred of their lovely guests sat and listened to the local radio. Luckily one of the bar staff found that a lead on a standard three-pronged kettle plug would do the trick, but my joy was short-lived when it slowly began to dawn on me that household kettle leads are only a foot long.

  With tears in my eyes I dragged my equipment over to a plug socket in the corner of the room, where I then spent the remaining few hours on my knees trying to get the party started. All people could see was the top of my head and latecomers thought I was a midget. I couldn't stand up straight for days after that night. Bruised and beaten, I decided to throw the disco towel in once and for all.

  My head had also been turned by live concerts. The first one I ever went to was the Four Tops on their 'Indestructible' tour live at the Manchester Apollo. They'd had a resurgence in the charts with 'Loco in Acapulco' and had proceeded to wheel out the old hits once again. I really enjoyed them, but then again it was my first ever concert. I would have probably enjoyed the Wurzels live at that point in my life. My only criticism was that the support band did longer than the Tops themselves.

  I saw Hall & Oates, Phil Collins, Prince (supported by the Pasadenas who got bottled by the crowd at Manchester City football ground as soon as they came onstage), Lyle Lovett and Was (Not Was) who supported Dire Straits and who were actually much better, David Byrne who was amazing both times I saw him and totally different, and U2 – I've seen them live many times over the years and what I find astonishing is that they always manage to outdo themselves every time.

  But Billy Joel has always remained my favourite. I've seen him live so many times. In fact, he's about to tour the UK again in the next couple of weeks for the first time in twelve years and I'm going to try to go to every one of his shows, writing permitting of course.

  It all started when my dad bought me an EP of 'Uptown Girl' on 12-inch in the November of 1983. It was a Saturday afternoon and I'd been out all day collecting bonfire wood all day. My dad came home from town on the bus at teatime and handed me the record. I was made up and played it over and over again. I'd seen the video on Saturday Morning Starship with Bonnie Langford and Tommy Boyd and thought it was brilliant.

  I got his follow-up single, 'Tell Her About It' (again on 12-inch — they were all the rage), for a Christmas present. It was another big hit and even though I knew very little about him, he was becoming a favourite in my house. The following summer Billy Joel came to the UK to play some dates on his 'Innocent Man' tour. I was too young to go but I was able to watch and listen to him with my dad. It was one of the first times that a concert had been broadcast live simultaneously on TV and radio. I recorded it on one of my dad's TDK 90s off Radio 1 in glorious VHF. I still have the cassette and have even managed to get hold of a VHS copy of the show.

  I was hooked. Maybe it's because my dad liked him too, but I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen and have remained a dedicated fan ever since.

  *

  As you've no doubt gathered over the last few pages, music is so integral to my life and my comedy that I can't begin to imagine any of my work without it. It's hard for me to envisage my stand-up without the wedding DJ playing his music at the end of the show or any episode of Phoenix Nights without Jerry singing one of his awful medleys with Les Alanos.

  So you can probably imagine my excitement when I discovered that I was being sent to work in a record shop for my work placement when I was at school in fourth year.

  When Mrs Divine asked each of us in our Careers lesson what we wanted to do in life, most of us hadn't got a clue. But when she got round to me and I thought about her question for a few seconds, I replied,

  'I'd like to be a nursery nurse miss.'

  Everybody laughed but it was one of the rare occasions in my life when I was being serious. I always thought of myself as being great with children. I liked to make them laugh and I genuinely thought I'd be good at it.

  'A nursery nurse?' she scorned back at me. 'But you're a lad.'

  'And?' I said, but Mrs Divine was having none of it. She assumed I was just trying to act the clown as usual but she was wrong.

  She sent me to Edwin P. Lees for a fortnight. It was a electrical shop in the town centre, a kind of Dixons without the glamour. I remember feeling gutted when she told me where I was going. I thought, you can't put me with kids so you're putting me with washing machines, marvellous. I don't think she could have got me further away from a child if she'd tried.

  I didn't relish the idea of selling white goods to the public for a fortnight. I knew nothing about vacuum cleaners, chest freezers and tumble dryers. But luckily God was smiling down on me on my first day. The shop manager wasn't too keen on having a work placement crowding up his precious shop floor. He decided to keep me out of sight, so he shoved me upstairs into the record department.

  It wasn't in the same league as HMV or Virgin but they still stocked the Top 40 and all of the latest releases. I was to work with Regina. She'd run the record department single-handedly since 1961. And now, because of 'these new-fangled CDs and laser discs', the future was starting to look bleak.

  The main problem with the record department at Edwin P. Lees is that nobody knew that they had one. The shop was widely known for selling white goods and when I told people I was working in the record department there, the general reaction seemed to be, 'Oh, I thought that had shut down years ago'.

  Here I am sat in a farmer's field, ironically the land is just across from where my mum's bungalow now sits thirty years later. It was the middle of August and I was roasting but I didn't have the heart to tell my mum... and I also couldn't speak yet.

  Either my dad or the farmer took this. It's a lovely photo and I only rediscovered it again recently when I was searching for photographs for this book. I've since had it transferred on to a set of attractive placemats.

  This is my mum and me practicing our ventriloquist act in the back yard. I used to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water while she drank it. We had quite a successful club act for years until The Krankies showed up and stole our thunder.

  This is my nana and me on a beautiful sunny day in Blackpool. I'm still wearing that same hat and the t-shirt as I type this right now, it's a bit snug under the arms but I'll manage.

  This a rarity, me with a football 'Aving it!' on Stanley Park in Blackpool with my dad and grandad. I refused to remove my shirt.

  Here I am riding the cable cars at Butlins Filey in 1979. I'd fallen out of one the previous day and knocked my front tooth out... I'm joking of course. Riding the cars was my big birthday treat and we went to a Butlins holiday camp every year until we found earwigs climbing up our bed in Skegness.

  This is me dressed as an Indian in my grandparent's front room, Christmas, 1977. My grandad always used to tell me that the reflection shining in the cabinet behind me was the star of Bethlehem, I believed him for years until I realised it was actually just a camera flash. Happy days.

  R Julie and me outside Granada Television Studios in Manchester, the Hollywood of the North. My dad only took the picture because he accidentally got off the bus three stops too early. Little did I realise I'd end up writing most of this book in that building twenty-five years later.

 
; This is my dad and me on Christmas day. It was the year Father Christmas brought me the best present ever, a Race & Chase. I was so ecstatic I went blind for several days.

  Butter wouldn't melt. This is me and Jesus's mum on the altar at my local church. I got the prestigious honour of being a guard to the May Queen that year. And I also got to wear the same outfit twenty-five years later when I started doing stand-up in the clubs.

  My dad sunbathing in Torquay. Although he wasn't doing it for long, I'd got an inflatable dinghy for my birthday the day before and after falling asleep in it I drifted off to sea. Two lifeguards had to swim out and save me half way to France. My dad immediately deflated it and I wasn't allowed to go out to sea in it again. (Incidentally we've still got those bath towels in the airing cupboard).

  The cast of TV's

  Diff'rent Strokes

  This is one of the only photographs I've got of myself in the mid-nineties and even then I had to lean into the frame just to get on it. It was taken by the side of Lake Windermere, there's nothing more to say except I used to love that shirt.

  Not content with my part time jobs I often resorted to having sales outside my house with some of the other local kids. Included in this sale was my Millennium Falcon, a This Life boxed set and some homemade bottles of Rose perfume. The local Avon lady shit herself when she found out.

  This is my graduation photograph and a newspaper article from the Bolton Evening News. I had to combine the two when I suddenly realised I'd run out of room in the photo section (I knew I should have left the Diff'rent Strokes one out). The graduation photo always makes me laugh as I'm actually holding a piece of a drain pipe with a ribbon tied round it as the scrolls hadn't arrived.

  Okay, you've looked at the pictures now buy the book or get out of the shop.

  As a result of this we had at the very most three customers a day, possibly twelve on a Saturday, which Regina considered to be a rush.

  She was a lovely lady, a trifle stern and old-fashioned in her approach but then again so would I be if I'd been trapped upstairs in a morgue of a record department for over a quarter of a century. She also sported a grey beehive of a hairdo, which most people found visually distressing; it was like being served by the bride of Frankenstein.

  Regina had very little time for contemporary sounds. OMD and KLF were just letters to her and when a customer once asked her about Aztec Camera she directed them to a local photography shop.

  Granted, she may not have known how to jack her body or pump up the jam, but she did know how to create a fan-shaped poster display for the new album by Brother Beyond to cover up a rising-damp stain on the wall above the Folk & Country section.

  To be fair, even though we had very few punters her mission to turn them into customers never wavered. She lived faultlessly by the motto 'If they'll browse, they'll buy'. She even felt-tipped her motto on to a piece of paper and stuck it under the counter (out of the customers' view of course). Derren Brown was no match for Regina when she tapped into a customer's mind. Casually she'd start by mentioning the state of the weather and ten minutes later some unsuspecting customer would be walking downstairs bewildered, clutching a carrier bag full of cassettes, albums and a laser disc of The Eagle Has Landed. Problem was, they never came back after they'd once been duped by Regina into buying a load of shite they didn't need.

  I was the complete opposite of Regina, in that I hated ripping people off. I knew from the other music shops in town that Regina's stock was vastly overpriced, and on the odd occasion she left me alone I made it my moral duty to inform the customers of any discrepancies in value for money. For example: 'Why don't you try the Vinyl Countdown?' I'd say. 'I was in there the other day and I saw the very same album for half the price.'

  I would have appreciated it if a shop assistant told me the truth when I went shopping. I just wasn't cut out for the dog-eat-dog world of retail. Maybe what I did was slightly dishonest, but with a fresh taste for deceitfulness I was about to take it to a higher level.

  Now, I've never stolen anything in my life – well, not unless you count the odd sweet from the pick 'n' mix down the multiplex, but then again everybody does that . . . don't they? Well, if you don't you should, especially when you go to the counter and realise the prices they're charging – 14p for penny chews.

  I'll stop digressing to tell you that I'm not proud of the actions I took during my time at Edwin P. Lees. All I can say in my defence is that I'm a human being at the end of the day and human beings make mistakes.

  What I'm about to tell you, I've never told anybody else – well, not that many. But hey, isn't that why you buy an autobiography, for moments of truth like this? I just hope you don't think less of me as a person and I just pray that one day we'll be able to look back at the whole sorry episode and laugh at it together.

  I was now into my second week of the work placement. Regina and I had established a working relationship and a modicum of trust had built between us. She'd nip into town on the odd occasion to do some errands and trust me to hold the fort. That's when the shit hit the fan.

  Leaving a music nut like myself alone in a record department is like leading a smackhead into a pub full of dealers. I had all the music I could ever dream of at my disposal and absolutely no way of adding it to my own music collection ... unless I could devise a cunning plan.

  That was the moment, dear reader, that I fell to the dark side. I figured that if I could just 'borrow' (and 'borrow' is the key word here) a few selections of music, then I could take them home, copy them (with my high-speed dub facility) and return them to their rightful place on the shelf the next day. Surely there wasn't a court in all the land that could construe that as theft? I was merely borrowing the music after all, rather like the library service that I'd grown so fond of on the other side of town.

  I hand-picked a few choice cuts of music, such as the original soundtrack to Dirty Dancing and Wet Wet Wet's Memphis Sessions (hardly worth taking the risk on reflection).

  Then, and here's the cunning bit, I decided to smuggle the music out of the building by shoving it down the front of my pants. I stuck to cassettes for obvious reasons. Shoving a couple of LPs down there would have given me an indiscreet square bulge and probably given the game away slightly.

  Regina never noticed a thing, not even me sweating like a pig and grunting my goodbye in fear as I left the shop. I was a nervous wreck and remember feeling dirty with guilt as I ran across town to the bus station. Perhaps it was because I had Dirty Dancing down the front of my pants, who knows?

  Once home, I felt safe and I ran upstairs into my bedroom to copy the cassettes immediately just before the fraud squad kicked my front door down. I could feel the threatening gaze of a thousand Catholic eyes staring down at me from heaven. My dreams were filled with dead nuns wagging their fingers and chanting, 'We knew you'd end up like this.' I could hardly sleep.

  I came in early the next morning and slipped the cassettes back on the shelf before Regina arrived. Phew! The relief was immense – I felt as though I'd been pardoned at the eleventh hour. But like most addicts, once you get away with it you keep going back for more.

  That night my bulge was bigger, as I somehow managed to shove Now 11, The Best of Level 42 and U2's Rattle and Hum down the front of my pants. Happy days!

  I must have taken more than twenty cassettes over the next few nights. As I got braver my bulges got bigger and every morning I expected Regina to stop me and say, 'Have you got cassette tapes down your pants or are you just pleased to see me?' She never did. But life has a cruel way of teaching you a lesson and one evening at closing time she said to me, 'If you ever fancy taking any music home to copy, then just help yourself, I do it all the time.'

  I was so mortified, I wanted to drop my pants right in front of her and shout,

  'Look at these, Regina.'

  I'd been living the life of a sinner for days, pale and emaciated from a lack of sleep, racked with guilt and ready to burn in hell over Level 42 and
Dirty Dancing.

  So the moral of the story is this: either honesty is the best policy, or if you're planning to smuggle something down the front of your pants, don't be too hasty because you never know, you might be allowed to already.