We congregated in Chippa’s room, joined by some of the girls in our entourage. It all started out reasonably well, joints were being passed around, along with some booze and a few lines. Then the Halcion thing started to veer out of control. Michael was handing them out like lollies; I went from party pooper to the life of the damned party in a heartbeat. As many of you will know, the barbiturate family of drugs really mess with your head; they erase your memory and generally make a real mess of you. So don’t ask me what happened that night. I just don’t know.
But I have been given first-hand reports. Apparently, I attempted to make it back to my room, but the hallways of St James Albany have little sets of stairs, six steps at regular intervals throughout the hotel. I just didn’t make it to my room.
I was found comatose, in a foetal position, on one of those little flights of stairs. A few hotel staff carefully and gently carried me back to my room and put me to bed.
This became a running joke. For the remainder of my stay, every time I’d drift in from the studio at around 2 a.m., the reception staff would smile.
‘Bonsoir, Rikki—would you like us to tucky-tuck you into bed, or will you be all right tonight?’
Titter titter, giggle giggle. Hardy bloody ha ha.
As I lay dozing on the stairwell, the rest of the entourage decided to walk to a friend’s apartment and continue the party there. I don’t know how they did it; I certainly wouldn’t have been able to manage it. When they opened the door, Chippa was so maggoted he bounced off all four walls and fell backwards onto a glass coffee table. Being drunk, he didn’t hurt himself, but it made a hell of a commotion, especially at 5 a.m.
The little old lady who lived in the apartment downstairs called the gendarmes. Michael and Gary, meanwhile, had retired to a bedroom with a couple of the girls, and had just gotten naked when the cops arrived. The cops handcuffed Gary to a chair in the middle of the room. Hutch then strolled out of the bedroom, naked, an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
‘Got a light, Gaz?’ he asked.
‘No, fuckhead. As you can see, the police have arrived and I’m naked and handcuffed to a chair!’
‘Oh. No need to snap,’ exclaimed Hutch in his inimitably cool style.
Now, remember I was sleeping like a baby and I promise you I was nowhere near the apartment. I hereby proclaim my innocence.
So imagine my shock when my girlfriend back in Sydney opened her morning paper to read: ‘MICHAEL HUTCHENCE AND RICHARD CLAPTON ARRESTED IN PARIS. NAKED AND HANDCUFFED TO CHAIR.’ She promptly called me and gave me my notice.
Triple M had a field day with the story, treating us like heroes, as did most of Australia. Only trouble was this: I wasn’t even there. I raged and ranted at my manager Gary for setting me up like that. He calmly qualified his actions—for it was he who had sent out the press release—by pointing out that some bloke called Gary was unknown to the general populace and was of no interest. But I had a name and albums to sell; this was just par for the course. Hype! It was far from funny, although I can laugh about it now.
We actually adopted a serious work ethic after the first couple of nights’ shenanigans. We turned up to work at Studios de la Grande Armée each morning at 10 and worked solidly until midnight, and the partying became less frequent. Every morning Chippa and I would recoil at the sight of Fifi La Font tucking into his steak tartare; I can’t think of anything worse for breakfast than a slab of raw steak with a raw egg dumped on top. Life in the studio was relatively sane.
However, on the night of my birthday, we booked ourselves a very long table at La Coupole (Ernest Hemingway’s favourite brasserie). There were maybe a dozen of us there, but no Michael Hutchence. He’d been partying in the South of France most of the week.
However, after a while Hutch appeared, looking the worse for wear. He made a beeline for me and plonked himself down in my lap.
He let out a yelp. ‘Rikki! I haven’t been to bed for three days, and boy, do I need a line!’
‘Shit, Michael,’ I answered, ‘don’t look at me!’
I seem to recall my last sight of Michael was of him disappearing in the direction of the men’s room.
The next time I caught up with Hutch, we were mucking about in someone’s room and he threw a chair out the window—from four floors up. Chippa told me that the hotel charged him $1200 for damages—seventeenth-century furniture doesn’t come cheap.
Richard Lowenstein, the Melbourne filmmaker who’d been responsible for most of INXS’s clips, arrived in Paris to start filming a video for my ‘Glory Road’ single. We’d be shooting in Paris and East and West Berlin. We started with a couple of days filming in the Tuilerie Gardens, just across the road from our hotel.
Jon, his Texan girlfriend Lisa and I rented a car and drove to Berlin for stage two of the shoot. We were looking sartorially splendid, all decked out in Yohji Yamamoto linen outfits. I’d banged on about the wonders of Berlin to Jonnie for so many years that it was a very personal, special adventure.
I took Jon and Lisa to all my old haunts and we spent a few really special days driving out to Wannsee, where I’d written most of Prussian Blue, and Klausenerplatz and Schloss Charlottenburg, where I had first lived in the commune.
I introduced Jon and Lisa to Volker and Andrea and we had a hilarious night in all the best bars in Berlin. Lisa ended up getting very drunk, and started to irritate a few of the Berlin University crowd, who were Volker’s colleagues. She demanded—in her strong Texan accent—that the Germans teach her how to say ‘Get fucked’ so she could tell them all to get fucked in their native dialect. A sort of cultural exchange.
Unfortunately, she just couldn’t get her tongue around it, so she did the rounds of the entire bar, telling them all—or so she thought—to get fucked. The Germans were egging her on, making strange little birdy noises and howling with laughter. The more they laughed the more outraged she became. The Germans were laughing louder and louder, because she was telling them to get finched—you know, like a finch, the little birdy! Too much vodka will do that to you.
Jon and Lisa were staying at the Kempinski, a wonderful old world Berlin hotel with an illustrious history. Jeppy had arrived and was also staying there. I was holed up in Volker’s apartment. Gary Grant had flown to New York, where Chris Lord-Alge was mixing my album. Chris had laid down the law—he insisted that Jon and I could not be present at the mix.
A very strange series of events took place one night at the Kempinski. The four of us had been out to dinner, and were in a very jovial mood. When we arrived back at the hotel there were a number of messages for me from Gary in New York urging me to call him immediately at the studio, but he also gave strict instructions that Jon wasn’t to know about the phone call.
I wrote the NY number on a notepad in Jon’s room and then went around to Jeppy’s room alone to make the call. But Jonnie, who suspected something was up, was no fool. Like a true Cold War spy, Jonnie used a pencil to lift the impression of the New York number off his notepad, just like in the movies. Before I even got to Jeppy’s room, Jonnie had phoned Chris and a full-scale argument broke out.
Chris, apparently, didn’t like certain aspects of Jon’s production work and had wanted my approval to change a few things. Jon and Chri
s were at loggerheads; Chris dug in and refused to listen to Jon’s point of view. When I arrived back in Jonnie’s room, they were still yelling at each other. It had degenerated into a battle of egos.
Needless to say, at the listening party at the legendary Air Studios in London, a couple of weeks later, everybody gave Lord-Alge’s mixes the thumbs up. That is the record you’ve been hearing all these years. And what a record: Sydney, Paris, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, back and forth, back and forth. Quite a journey.
We drove back to Amsterdam, arrived about midnight, checked into the American Hotel and went looking for coffee. We found a place that looked innocent enough, and Jon insisted that I try the cake.
‘It’s the best cake in the world, you know,’ he told me.
Indeed it was delicious, so I ordered a second slice. Shortly after, I started to complain that I was feeling ill and would have to go back to the hotel. Jon was at first quite concerned, but then quickly realised that I had been eating ‘Space Cake’, loaded with hashish. I wasn’t sick, I was stoned out of my brain.
Back at the American, still in our fabulously expensive linen Yohji outfits, Jon and I reclined together in a bath full of water and floating Heineken bottles, which bobbed around us in the tub.
Richard Lowenstein had hired twenty-two people for the shoot. I nearly fell over when I saw them all the next morning. He had a full German film crew, a producer from Ireland who had worked on most of U2’s videos, a catering crew, and his personal assistant Troy, from Melbourne, who, according to legend, had worked as a female shop assistant at David Jones in Melbourne for many years. They also recruited four German girls from a nightclub to mime the backing vocals, no doubt promising to make them stars when they were seen all over the world.
The first day’s shoot in West Berlin went off without a hitch; it was an excellent day’s work. We were then to move to East Berlin, where I’d had my share of unpleasant and sometimes scary experiences in the past, so you could understand my trepidation. As we crossed Checkpoint Charlie, smuggling in professional film cameras and all sorts of equipment, I’d convinced myself that if we did end up in an East German prison or, worse still, Siberia, then it’d be a glorious way to go out. It was all art for art’s sake, anyway.
However, luckily we got through without a hitch. There was a huge entertainment complex—if you could call it that—named The People’s Palace, right in the centre of East Berlin. Once we’d converted our currency into East German marks, it became useless, so one had to spend it all before leaving the DDR.
So off we went to The People’s Palace and got rotten on Russian vodka for about ten cents a shot, drinking until we’d run out of East German marks. I became a little nervous when my party started to shout and laugh and generally carry on in a very rowdy fashion. I was understandably nervous about attempting to cross back into West Berlin.
By this time, Troy had started to yell and whistle and behave in a very camp manner. He insisted on being the first of our party to enter the private booths where the East German Police interrogated everyone individually.
Once inside a booth, Troy began giggling about how cute the border cop was, what a nice arse he had, and the rest of it. Believe it or not, we got through okay. Somehow the ‘Glory Road’ video got made and you can still see it on YouTube today. Three years later the Wall came down.
I returned to Berlin to stay with Volker and his new wife Andrea. Jimmy Barnes had been calling, asking me to fly across to San Francisco where he was hard at work on the Freight Train Heart album. He said that if I made the trip, I could get involved in the lyric writing for his album, which he was recording with the American band Journey. It was tempting. I was in a holding pattern, anyway, because there’d be a period of time before WEA would get started with marketing and promo for my Glory Road album. I gladly took up Jimmy’s offer.
Jimmy called from San Francisco the night before I flew out to make sure I was going to show up.
When I arrived at The Record Plant in Sausalito someone passed a joint around but Jimmy warned: ‘I know you, Ralph—don’t make a pig of yourself!’
‘Of course not,’ I replied.
However, Jimmy and Journey were all hard at work and I started to get bored hanging around this big empty recording studio in the middle of the night. I started dabbling—sneaking in a toke here and there until I was really quite stoned.
Jimmy appeared out of nowhere; it felt like an ambush. He was with Randy Jackson, the famous bass player (more recently seen in American Idol), who was—and is—super straight. Jimmy was raving about how great my Glory Road album was, and then suggested that Randy and I find an empty studio, so he could listen to my LP for himself. So I had to sit in an empty studio, with this squeaky-clean music icon and feign sobriety for over an hour. I could barely talk.
Jim and Jane had rented an enormous house over in Mill Valley, so I moved in. Jimmy’s kids, Mahalia and EJ, were very young, so our time at Mill Valley was very civilised, very family friendly.
There was trouble in the studio, however. Journey called an emergency band meeting with Jimmy and laid down the law. They’d written the music for Jimmy’s album, and they sure as hell were not going to allow a rank outsider—that would be me—to come in and write all the lyrics. I’d flown all that way for nothing. There was no point trying to fight it, so I decided to treat the San Francisco leg of my journey as a holiday. You could pick worse places.
Things heated up on my return to Australia. I was thrown straight into a whirlwind of work to prepare Glory Road for release. Now single again—I’d lost Jannike in the aftermath of the ‘naked and handcuffed to a chair’ episode with Hutch—I moved into a new place with Jonnie. INXS were now at their worldwide peak, and it was a very exciting time for the band, and equally exciting being around them.
But their success didn’t rub off on me. Triple M were the Number One radio station in Australia, and very supportive of Glory Road, but there was sniping from some quarters about Rod being my patron while also owning the Austereo network, and we were perhaps overly sensitive to what the public perception of all this might be. I think Rod actually tried to dissuade his staff from pushing the album in any way that could be construed as over the top.
Some idiotic journalist wrote a full-page story in the Sydney Morning Herald claiming that Glory Road had cost $750,000 and was simply an exercise in hedonism and decadence, to the detriment of the music. This was plain wrong. As with all my other albums, the project was 90 per cent hard work and professionalism, and 10 per cent partying. Sure, in this book I shine a light on the funny and/or interesting stories, because it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than describing the long hours spent getting drum sounds, or how we hauled guitar amps all over the studio in search of the perfect sound, or the fine-tuning involved in mixing an album.
And for the record, Glory Road cost $210,000 to make, an average album budget for 1987.
One night, ‘Stumpy’, my roadie of many years, and I walked into Benny’s Bar to find a woman named Susie and a friend of hers cavorting drunkenly up on the bar to the strains of ‘My Way’. Susie, who I learned was a drama student, and I plunged headlong into a fiery relationship, fuelled by booze and drugs. We were on an emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows—mood swings that often changed several times in a
single day.
Susie had been an international model for many years and had spent her time on the dark side, as many of those women do. She was very guarded about her past, but I put together a fairly accurate profile of her years as a model—then I lived with the consequences.
A few weeks into our relationship, I took her on the road. One night after a gig we were back in the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, my second home from the old days, when a very strange guy continued calling our room from about 2 a.m. till dawn. He was making very improper suggestions, and despite me continually hanging up on him, he seemed determined to let me know about some shadowy liaison he’d been having with Susie for a long time. He even claimed that they were still lovers.
Susie and I were getting drunker and drunker and argumentative. When the booze made us belligerent, I picked up her bags and hurled them out the window. I immediately turned remorseful, and begged forgiveness, but by then she was out the door.
It was now 6 a.m. and the hotel guests were stirring. I charged down the hallway to the lift, naked bar a T-shirt pulled down to my knees, whimpering, but she dived into the lift with two little old ladies and left me standing there.
I pursued Susie for days on the phone, but she ignored my calls. Finally she spoke with me and said quite plainly and simply that the relationship was not going to work unless the drinking stopped.
‘You’re right,’ I told her, and pledged my undying love. I’m fairly sure that we managed to keep on the straight and narrow for quite a while after that.
But one fateful night Susie and I were at Rod and Kathy’s beautiful new house at Elizabeth Bay, right on the harbour. Rod’s new pride and joy was a very expensive powerboat called a Scarab, which he’d moored right on the water in front of his house. Despite our pact, it was New Year’s Eve, so we cut loose and partied into the night.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 21