James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

  However, when I was sixteen I had never listened to ‘All Along The Watchtower’, so as far as I was concerned, this man was just jamming out with a riff he had made up on the spot. I have to say, I was impressed. I really dug it. This guy had some skills – what a beautiful song to make up so effortlessly. It truly was an honour to jam out alongside him. But now I had to join in on the drums. I listened to the riff and thought it sounded pretty bluesy, pretty rocky, but all the drummers before me had played a blues or rock beat and I had to show these guys what I was made of in order to stand out from the crowd. So I played a disco beat. Sixteenths on the hi-hat, funky and dance-y all the way, and as far as I was concerned it worked, it worked very nicely indeed. You might not believe that it worked very nicely indeed but imagine that you’ve never heard ‘All Along The Watchtower’ before, and the first time you hear it, it’s got a disco beat. You wouldn’t think it was awful, you’d actually think it was a pretty great song.

  However, I am the only person this has ever happened to and probably the only person it will ever happen to because no other musician would dream of mixing Hendrix with disco and I was the only person in The Poppies Social Club that evening who had never heard ‘All Along the Watchtower’. I was grooving away, opening and shutting the hi-hat on the off-beats, but when I looked up and around the room for the first time the reception appeared hostile.

  The musicians I was playing with looked less than pleased. They were all standing awkwardly, with rigid posture as if they were being forced to play the song against their will, and the audience were all staring daggers at me, older men in flat caps gripping their pints until their knuckles turned white, glaring at this young buck on the drums. But I couldn’t change now, I had to keep going. The vocalist began to sing what to my ears was a very pleasing melody, so surely that would calm people down. I started listening to the vocals and then heard him sing a familiar line (the lyric in question being ‘All along the watchtower’) and I thought, Oh no. I’ve heard of that.

  Now I hadn’t ever sat down and properly listened to ‘All Along the Watchtower’, and I certainly didn’t recognise the riff straight away, but when I heard the title of the song sung by the lead vocalist then you better believe I realised there and then that I was currently turning the timeless classic ‘All Along the Watchtower’ into a Bee Gees tune in front of people to whom the song meant a great deal. I wracked my brains to try and remember who the song was by and when I remembered, my panic levels shot through the roof. The only thing worse than realising you’re currently ruining a song by Jimi Hendrix is realising you’re currently ruining a song by Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. Two of the all-time greats butchered with one damn funky beat (and it was damn funky). They cut the song short (not that I had any idea, my dad was watching from the back and told me afterwards), and another drummer was ushered hastily towards the kit. As I was putting my sticks back in my bag two people came up to me, one by one. The first was an angry looking old boy, pint in hand, who told me in a slow and raspy voice, ‘No one – NO ONE – plays a disco beat to “All Along the Watchtower”.’ And I nodded because I had already figured that out all by myself.

  The second man to approach me described my take on the song as, ‘One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever witnessed.’ That sounds pretty extreme as it is, but even more so when you consider that the jam night took place on (and remember that everything in this book is true) 11 September 2001. On the actual day itself. There was footage of New York being shown on the TV screens in the bar and yet he still felt the need to say this to me. Some people have found it hard to understand why the jam night was not cancelled that night, considering the news, but I think we all know that if we had cancelled the jam then the terrorists would have won. And nothing sticks it to them more, in my opinion, than a good old-fashioned disco beat. So in many ways, I had done the right thing.

  Reunion

  When I was sixteen I was walking through Kettering town centre and bumped into a guy called Darren. Darren was a few years above me in school and had been a roadie on the school band trip to Holland two years ago.

  ‘I’m organising a Holland reunion, are you in? We’re doing it in Derby because Mr Logan lives in York now and Derby is in between York and Kettering. Are you in? We leave on Saturday morning from the school car park at ten. Are you in?’

  I was in. Anything to get back with the old school band crew again; that tour had been one of the happiest weeks of my life. I couldn’t wait to sit around with the old gang and reminisce about the bobsled rollercoaster and the parrot soup saga, each of us taking it in turns to do an impression of that guy saying ‘parrot soup’, speculating between ourselves about where the parrot really did go at six every night. I couldn’t wait.

  Ten a.m. on Saturday I arrived at the school car park and saw Darren waiting by his car. ‘Yes! Second one here!’ I crowed.

  Darren shook his head, ‘Last one here, mate, get in the car, let’s go.’

  While Darren and I were driving to Derby he explained to me that everybody else, all sixty of them, had RSVP’d ‘no’ and the Holland reunion was just going to be the two of us plus our ex-teacher Mr Logan hitting the town in Derby (aka Fun Central). I didn’t know either of them very well and had never really ‘hit the town’ before so this would be very interesting, and by interesting I mean scary, uncomfortable and heavily laced with regret. I was never one of those students who thought it was great to see their teachers outside of school in their normal clothes living a normal life like a normal person. I actually preferred to keep them as they were, smartly dressed and in charge, maybe even as role models. What I definitely did not want to do was see them get smashed in Derby town centre, smiling at women then getting pissy when the women didn’t smile back, reminding me that none of the adults in my life really know what they’re doing and that I too will never fully figure anything out. Luckily, I never fully respected Mr Logan in the first place so this might not be so bad.

  Darren and I arrived at the hotel hours before Mr Logan’s ETA and headed straight to our room. England were playing Greece at football on the TV. I don’t follow football but Darren told me this was a very important game and that as long as England didn’t lose then they would qualify for the World Cup. Darren then produced a bottle of peach schnapps from his bag and insisted that every time any of the commentators said ‘Beckham’ we had to do a shot. Beckham was team captain at the time, was heavily involved in the game and scored the goal that won the match. To be honest, I don’t think the commentators said anything other than ‘Beckham’ for the entire game.

  By the end of the game I was a lifeless wreck and felt like I was gonna vom. Peach schnapps is a pretty sickly drink to start the night with, let alone to get fully drunk on, and to this day I can’t hear someone say ‘Beckham’ without wanting to chuck my guts up. Darren went to the pub next door to carry on drinking. I instead chose to have a nap (or a schnap as I would’ve called it had I possessed the ability to form thoughts and ideas).

  I was awoken from my schnap by a loud knocking. I answered the hotel room door, still drunk on schnapps, and did not recognise the man standing, grinning, before me. Mr Logan laughed his head off, chucked his bags in the room, and then took me to the pub where Darren had been drinking solo for about an hour. I didn’t much want to be there any more and desperately wanted to feel normal again so I asked for a soft drink and an ice cream sundae and sat very still eating the sundae very slowly while Logan and Darren hit the bar. Schnapps followed by a soft drink and an ice cream sundae called Totally Chocoriffic is something I would never do these days because I know a thing or two about blood sugar, but back then my answer to everything was ice cream. (It still is but I have to pick my moments. I once cheered myself up after a break-up by eating a whole tub of Ben & Jerry’s while scrolling down the Ben & Jerry’s website reading about the Ben & Jerry’s flavours America have that we don’t. I would now like a free crate of Ben & Jerry’s please.) By the time we left and hea
ded for the town I was sober and riding the dizziest sugar high imaginable while my associates were now thoroughly hammered. I then spent the evening watching two people I didn’t know very well get utterly blasted for five hours.

  I didn’t start properly getting drunk with friends until I was about twenty-three years old and I think the reason I started joining in was because I couldn’t stand around watching people getting drunk any more. Not because I was jealous but because when you see people get drunk it looks like the most pointless activity you could ever imagine. You are watching someone become progressively worse as the night goes on and yet they insist it’s the best. Unless you also have some sort of buzz going, drunk people are the most irritating company you could ever wish to keep. Having a conversation with a drunk person when you are sober is like being a classroom assistant in a primary school for kids who are drunk.

  I was awoken by both Mr Logan and Darren. They were leaning over me, smiling excitedly as they giddily informed me that we would now be trashing the hotel room. I had been woken up to better news in my lifetime. When I was a child I remember my mother waking me up and telling me it was snowing and so I rushed to the window and watched it snow and the world looked pristine and pure and I felt glad to be awake and experiencing life.

  When I was told we were trashing the hotel room by an ex-teacher and an older boy I didn’t know that well, I immediately started looking forward to twelve hours’ time when I could go back to sleep again and put this day behind me, even though none of it had happened yet. I don’t know if you’ve ever trashed a hotel room with your ex-schoolteacher but it’s a melancholy activity to say the least. I felt ever so forlorn and yet adrenalin was coursing through my veins all the same. My two accomplices were flipping over mattresses and pushing over lamps, taking their frustrations with the world out on the furniture (and the cleaner, who would inevitably have to deal with the mayhem they had caused).

  My only contribution to the room-trashing was to open all the little milks. I didn’t even tip them out or splat them against the wall; I just opened them all one by one and arranged them on the table in a line. Those milks were now unusable, I was officially a rebel, the aforementioned cleaner would have to pour them down the sink now, and I had finally become the child my parents always feared I would be – a tearaway of the highest order.

  An open milk

  Mr Logan, a secondary schoolteacher in his late thirties, emptied the bin into the bath and then left to play golf with some colleagues in York. Darren and I got in his car, turned on Classic FM (the eeriest station to listen to after a hotel room trashing – he put it on as a joke but it still felt like the move of a psychopath) and travelled back to Kettering. In all the excitement of trashing the room I had completely forgotten to brush my teeth so instantly started brushing my teeth in the car while we were driving home on the motorway because if I don’t brush my teeth I imagine them coated in fur in my mouth and feel a compulsive need to clean them. But I had not planned ahead, so once I had finished brushing I had no idea where I was supposed to spit. Naturally, I wound down the window and spat out of the window without giving it a second thought. We were travelling at eighty miles per hour so inevitably this resulted in the side of Darren’s car getting completely peppered with my toothpaste spit, like a gross minty racing stripe. It had been quite the reunion.

  Road Sign

  Trashing the hotel room had been my very first act of rebellion. This was because I was a good boy who thought his parents were cool. Shortly after the Holland reunion I attempted to be rebellious once more, but this time out of choice.

  I was seventeen, had just left school, and my friend Martin had recently passed his driving test and got his own car. From then on he and I and our friends Stan and Wardy could finally do as we pleased. When the first person in your friendship group gets their driving licence a whole new world opens up for you, a world of infinite possibility – we were free. And so we would regularly get an atlas (already a sign that we’re not being as radical as we could be), pick a place in the county we hadn’t been before (always within the county as we all had to be home in time for tea), and then we’d drive there. Our destination would usually be a village and once we’d arrived we would walk around said village commenting on how lovely the village was. If you saw me walking round one of these villages admiring a quaint thatched cottage you would never guess I was the same hoodlum who once opened all the milks and left them out on the side.

  It may or may not have been pointed out to us by several people that we were an undeniable bunch of dweebs, and so one night we set out to do something well and truly naughty, just because we’d never been well and truly naughty before. We decided that we would steal a road sign. Not a temporary fold-out one, but a permanent, bolted-to-a-pole road sign (the sort that people needed in order to navigate home in the dead of night or during a storm, for example). So we gathered the necessary tools (which Wardy already owned because he was old before his time) and set off at one in the morning, looking for a sign to steal.

  It’s hard trying to be well and truly naughty when you’re not used to being well and truly naughty. Every sign we saw seemed to be a little too important, like if we stole it we might properly ruin someone’s life, and so we decided to steal a sign that no one would really miss. We settled on one of those circular blue signs of a person walking and a bicycle underneath them. I believe these signs indicate that a path is for pedestrians and cyclists, so that way we were messing with two groups of people.

  We found a cycle/foot-path by the side of the road that featured one of these signs every few feet, which meant if we stole one we would be inconveniencing no one because they were literally everywhere. The worst thing that might’ve happened is that some pedestrian might one day be walking along that path and a cyclist overtakes them at the exact place where the road sign we stole should’ve been and the pedestrian shouts their complaints after the cyclist, then a few feet later sees a road sign informing them that this is a path for pedestrians and cyclists, at which point they realise it was fine for the cyclist to use the path and then they feel a bit silly for getting cross. Already we were not rebelling against anyone; if anything we were creating an unnecessary job for ourselves when we could’ve been doing something fun like watching a documentary and then having a discussion about some of the issues it raised.

  ‘This is a footpath & a cyclepath’

  Oh, and we also decided to film ourselves stealing this sign. This was before the days of camera phones so we had to bring an actual camcorder out with us to film on. We always took this camcorder out with us whenever we went for a drive and until then it had only ever contained footage of lovely villages and charming countryside walks, but now we were using it to film us doing something illegal because that’s what well-behaved criminals do – they provide their own evidence so as not to waste anyone’s time should things go to trial.

  We parked the car next to the path and I set the camcorder to night vision. I was the camera man, Martin the getaway driver, and Stan and Wardy would be stealing the sign. I knelt by the car, filming the whole thing in glorious green. I captured everything, including Wardy mistaking a passing vehicle for a police car, running away and falling into a ditch within seconds. (We considered sending the footage of Wardy falling into the ditch to You’ve Been Framed but didn’t for fear of arrest in case the producers watched the rest of the tape and witnessed our dastardly crime. If Beadle has passed the recording on to the po-po we’d have been toast for sure. Getting on You’ve Been Framed wouldn’t make up for a lifetime in the clink and we probably couldn’t bail all four of us out with the £250 they paid us either.)

  Wardy clambered out of the ditch and finished the theft. Credit where it’s due, they took down the road sign rather efficiently, as is the way when you’re usually a well-behaved group of boys – you tend to be quite good at organising and planning and getting the job done smoothly. We’d already foreseen any potential hitches and had dealt wit
h them all accordingly. When we watched the footage back, the moment where they managed to separate the sign from the pole was both exhilarating and pathetic. Wardy and Stan remove the sign, excitedly shout, ‘We’ve got it, oh my god, we’ve got it!’ then all three of us run back into the car, squealing with glee, the doors slamming behind us. Then we all cheer and Martin presses play on the stereo and ‘Movies’ by the band Alien Ant Farm blasts out of the speakers at full volume as we all drive off singing along to it and passing the sign between us, laughing like maniacs.

  At that moment I felt immortal. I can try and play it down but that would be dishonest. It was intoxicating. I would wholeheartedly recommend stealing a road sign that no one really needs because then you too will know how it feels to be alive. In fact, any chance you get to do something technically illegal while making zero difference to anyone’s life, take it. I know, I know, I’m an appalling role model and yes, if everyone stole one of those cycle/foot-path signs then it would end up affecting people because there’d be no signs letting people know if it’s OK to cycle and walk on the same path but I think after maybe half of them go missing the police will crack down on it, so if you are planning on stealing one of these signs my advice is get in early before the fuzz have got their peepers all over them.

  Wardy kept the sign in his room. The pigs never caught us. Wardy’s mum did see it on his shelf one day and asked what it was doing in his room so, without putting up much of a fight, he ’fessed up and told her everything. Once he’d finished singing like a canary she looked disappointed but not in the way he’d hoped for. We all ended up telling our parents and receiving the same reaction. What’s a guy got to do to get told off these days? The last time I’d received a proper dressing-down was when I used Siobhan’s coat as my own personal towel. Did I have to go back to school in order to ever get in trouble again?! As it turned out, yes, that’s precisely what I was supposed to do.