The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  Van der Graaf were dark, heavy and moody: a thinking man’s type of band. Peter Hammill was a bit like a wild poet, punching the air during songs. The trouble was they had no idea how to put a set together. They’d put all the up songs in a row and then all the heavy, ponderous ones together, and by the end it’d be so dark and you’d be so depressed you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. I learned how not to structure a set from them.

  Van der Graaf had been the biggest act on Charisma for a while but then Lindisfarne had a huge hit with ‘Fog on the Tyne’, a really quirky, stompy, clap-along song. They were all characters and would sit in the back of the tour bus with their Newcastle Brown (they could be really drunk but still perform). When we got to Newcastle it was like turning up with the Beatles. I can remember wanting to go on stage and say: ‘Hello Newcastle! We’re friends of Lindisfarne! They like us!’

  This was before we’d borrowed their brand new van.

  One of the nicest things about the Six Bob Tour was staying in hotels. We didn’t have to drive back home after each gig. The thought of getting to Newcastle and not driving back was unbelievable: a bed! Not a very nice bed, but a bed! For us, even B & Bs were financially out of the question at this stage. If the gig was really too far to drive there and back in a night, we’d sometimes be allowed to sleep on the headlining band’s floor. Caravan, who had a house in Canterbury, put us up several times.

  It was purely because I needed to stay awake to drive that I started taking cocaine: it wasn’t recreational, it was just better at keeping me awake than Tony singing Beatles songs while I drove us to Cornwall and back.

  Drugs were not something that Tony or Pete ever did. Phil, Rich and I could always enjoy a spliff but although everyone always thought Pete was completely out of his head, he never even drank much. He used to have one beer and get smashed. One glass of wine and it was all over. And Tony couldn’t bear the thought of being out of control so he never took anything, but that didn’t mean he was safe. There’d been one weekend at the cottage when Rich had invited some of his friends down so that they could all take acid together while the rest of us, including Tony, went off home. When one of Rich’s friends, Bill, offered to drive Tony to the station in Dorking, Tony accepted, completely unaware of the fact that Bill had dropped some acid first. He must have been a bit surprised by how lovely Bill thought Dorking high street was: ‘Man, look at the lovely lamppost!’

  * * *

  In the summer of 1971 Strat rented an old country house in Crowborough in East Sussex for us to use while we wrote our next album, Nursery Cryme. We didn’t see him much, but at the weekends he’d come down and get in the bath at 10 a.m. and stay there till lunchtime, reading the papers. So we still didn’t see him much.

  We didn’t take criticism very well in the early years of our career. We were probably quite overbearing in our knowledge of how good we thought we were. We’d hand Strat the tape of an album when we’d finished recording and that would be it – we’d never ask, ‘What do you think?’ There were times when I’m sure we would have benefited from a second opinion but Strat believed in us, too, which rubbed off. When we saw him for meetings at the Charisma offices we’d come out feeling great: uplifted, confident. ‘Dear boy, it’s tremendous!’

  As individuals we weren’t very confident but we had confidence in our music being strong and different. Plus you had to be a bit cocky: it was the only attitude you could have if you wanted to succeed. Without Strat, however, I don’t think we would have got anywhere. Our first three albums with Charisma were basically an apprenticeship. We learned how to play our instruments properly, how to play live, how to record, and creatively we were given a completely free rein to an extent that you couldn’t imagine today. We would never have A & R men or record company execs coming in from outside and commenting on what we were doing: people knew that they shouldn’t ask to hear a record until it was finished.

  Nursery Cryme wasn’t an easy album to write. Maybe it was just the new dynamics that made it feel so difficult by comparison. If Ant had been around I’m sure it wouldn’t have been so slow but we needed to find our feet without him to get to the next stage. This was especially true for me: I wrote one song, ‘Harlequin’, where I tried to play both my guitar part and Ant’s on a single twelve-string guitar by tuning the pairs of strings to harmonies. It was pretty dodgy. Not my finest moment lyrically, either: ‘There once was a harvest in this land / Reap from the turquoise sky, harlequin, harlequin’. ‘Harvest’ is a word I’ve learned not to use in songs.

  Besides ‘Musical Box’ we had one other song already up and running before we got to Crowborough. ‘Return of the Giant Hogweed’ had something for everybody in the band: fast drumming for Phil, triplet stuff with Tony and Steve playing harmonies together, and a quirky lyric from Pete about a plant that’d escaped from Kew Gardens.

  ‘Seven Stones’ was very much Tony’s song. It was a great example of what I’ve come to call Tony’s cabaret chords: his big, schmaltzy, music-hall chords which Phil and I struggled with but he loved. In the end we had to make a rule: Tony could have three or four per album and no more. (We always wondered what happened to the ones we’d turned down. Then in 2011 Tony released a wonderful classical album and we found out.)

  ‘Absent Friends’ was Phil and Steve’s song. I could have done without it on the record but because it was something that the pair of them – the new recruits –had written together it seemed right to have it there. Plus you listened to anything that Phil brought in. Pete, Tony and I would bring something we’d written in and then argue our case, whereas Phil never felt the need. His attitude was always, ‘This is it guys. Take it or leave it.’ There was never any ego with Phil.

  Steve was different. He hadn’t known us for long, so didn’t quite know how to play the game like the rest of us and fight his corner, but there was another problem too. His real strength was doing the most amazing, unique, quirky-sounding things on guitar – he brought something to the band that Ant never would have done and I fully appreciated it. But Steve didn’t get satisfaction from that: he wanted to be a writer.

  * * *

  By this time, Pete had married Jill, who was the daughter of the Queen’s private secretary, in a ceremony at Saint James’s Palace. The story got around that Rich had got there early and sat on the Queen’s throne before anyone arrived. Pete and Jill were now living in a basement flat in Wandsworth, which is where I had to go one night to tell Jill that Pete had broken his ankle during a gig at the Friars in Aylesbury. She saw me on the doorstep and thought I’d come to tell her he’d died, but Pete had just had a ‘We are one!’ moment with the crowd and leapt off the stage to be embraced. The crowd had their own ‘We are one!’ moment and got out of his way. Fast.

  At the time we didn’t believe Pete had broken his ankle, and we definitely didn’t believe he couldn’t play an encore.

  ‘It’s just a sprain! What are you talking about? You’ll be fine!’

  We only allowed Tony to drive him to hospital after we’d made him finish the gig.

  The next few weeks after that, playing shows with Pete in a wheelchair, were slightly surreal. He didn’t get any sympathy from us, although you’d see people in the audience who didn’t know he’d only broken his leg thinking: ‘Ah, how brave! Poor guy . . .’ But we were terrified when he started charging up and down the stage: there were real cambers on some of them and it was a worry whether he’d stop in time. You’d just about breathe a sigh of relief and then he’d start waving his crutches around like he was possessed: quite scary, actually. But the show went on.

  At the time Tony had met his future wife, Margaret. As for me, things were a bit more complicated.

  I first met Angie Downing when she was seventeen years old and she was going out with my old Charterhouse friend, John Alexander. Before I split up with Josie, we went to his house in Chelsea one day with our cocker spaniel. When Angie opened the door it struck me how gorgeous she was – she drew m
e in with her big brown eyes and she captivated me. Unfortunately Angie didn’t seem to have the same bolt of lightning. She remembers opening the door and thinking how much Josie and I resembled our cocker spaniel with our Afghan coats and long hair with a middle parting. Never mind the doleful look . . .

  John Alexander looked more like a rock star than the actual thing. He had long black hair, a swarthy look, snake hips and a cool Chelsea wardrobe. He used to cruise along the King’s Road in either a Mini Cooper S with dark-tinted windows or his sporty looking Marcus. He also had all the equipment – guitars that is – and that’s where I came in . . . I borrowed them.

  He had it all, including the girl of my dreams, which really pissed me off. As far as the girl was concerned, she’d have to wait – I needed to figure a plan to impress her. It looked like it might take a while as I was still driving around in a crappy Mini Traveller.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Belgium liked us! Thank God for that!

  Trespass had reached number 1 in the charts there whereas in the UK it had only got to number 98.

  This meant that sailing over to Brussels in January 1972 for our first European gig was incredibly exciting. For me, and although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, it was also the start of a lifetime following in my father’s footsteps.

  In 1932 Dad had sailed over to Brussels for the funeral of the Belgian king, Albert I, as second-in-command of the British naval guard that had been sent for the occasion. The ceremony:

  entailed a long wait on a chilly day and while old stagers like myself had ‘dried out’, no liquid intake since the previous evening, some of the younger men had neglected advice and some of the older ones found that their internal plumbing was not as good as they thought.

  A stage was reached where about half the guard needed urgent relief or might suffer real injury and no public lavatory in sight.

  To our Belgian Army Liaison Officer there was no problem. Brandishing his sword at the spectators he opened up a lane disclosing the entrance to a dismal little public park with a few blackened trees and bushes but no sign of any convenience. Indicating the inner face of the four-foot brick wall surrounding the park he announced that it would be ‘très convenable’ and the afflicted trooped through the entrance like footballers taking the field and, lining up, began shamefacedly to do their thing.

  England was then a puritanical country where mere exposure of the person in a public park would bring park keepers and police and lead them to an appearance before the beak, a sharp fine, a stinging rebuke and a few lines in the press placing the defendant forever in the category of a disgrace to his family. ‘Queer feller – had up for exposing himself in the park – no real breeding on that side of the family’ and so on. Permissiveness and full frontal nudity were still years ahead.

  This, however, was the Continent where it was quite usual for men’s urinals to be situated on the route to the ladies’ toilets so that a gentleman while controlling operations with one hand could use the other to raise his hat in courteous salutation to passing ladies of his acquaintance.

  Far from being affronted, the spectators repositioned themselves for a better view. Children were hoisted on to the wall and the operation explained as clouds of steam arose and there was even a hint of muted applause.

  Dad could have been describing the view from the stage at most of the festivals I’ve ever played. You’d be standing there and great clouds of steam would rise up off the crowd whenever the sun broke through, the effect of both the mass of bodies and what had come out of them as well.

  At the Black Cat Club in Brussels the problem wasn’t the lack of loos but the lack of safety exits. It was downstairs, there was no back entrance and the crowd were all sitting cross-legged on the floor. Smoking. Given that we now had a mellotron, which we’d bought from King Crimson and which was the size of a table with two huge double keyboards, a quick escape wouldn’t have been easy.

  A few days later we appeared on Belgian TV. This wasn’t our first experience of public broadcasting. In February 1970 we’d recorded a live session for the BBC’s Night Ride radio programme, which was produced by Alec Reid and was the only early recording of ours that sounded any good. We played several songs that hadn’t made it on to Trespass: ‘Pacidy’, ‘Going Out to Get You’ (which was twenty minutes long) and a song called ‘The Shepherd’, which Tony sang. My hunch is that because it was an hour-long show, no one minded Tony singing, but I think to this day Tony thinks his voice is better than it is. In terms of vocal abilities I would say we were about the same and I have a pretty realistic opinion of my voice, but Tony always thought his was better. I tell him to his face sometimes that it isn’t, but I don’t think he quite believes me.

  A few months after Night Ride we’d made our TV debut on Disco 2, a late night BBC2 programme which was like a precursor to The Old Grey Whistle Test. We’d played ‘The Knife’ against a blue-screen background, which had war footage projected on it, and the technicians had also put a blue card under my bass strings – all pretty corny. In Belgium the TV studio had a white backdrop, until we’d all walked across it and set up and it wasn’t really white anymore. They had to paint out our trails before they could start filming.

  There were always technical problems with TV shows in those days. We tried to do what we could to stop them being a disaster – but knew that they were never going to be any good. The technicians also had a completely different mindset to the roadies, who just want to get the job done. TV technicians only seemed to be concerned with getting their teabreaks. This meant a lot of waiting around, or ‘hurry up and wait’ as it’s called: you’d arrive at the studio, go into make-up and then sit around for three hours wondering what you were doing there.

  We were successful in Belgium but we seemed to be even more popular in Italy, where Nursery Cryme had got to number 4. It would be the start of a long love affair because our romantic, emotional songs felt right in Italy. Rome was always a good city for us: the feeling of age, history and grandeur worked as a setting for our music. Within a very short time we started playing arenas and stadiums but in the early days we’d just play at little local discos to audiences of fourteen-year-old schoolgirls. The shows would always be in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday because the kids had to get home in time for bed.

  We were playing up in the mountains one night when Tony got food poisoning. We battled on for a bit without him but it was like being in a car that had lost a wheel and we had to finish the set early. Because we hadn’t managed to sell many tickets, this meant that the promoter had just the excuse he was looking for not to pay us. Rich wasn’t having any of it and got a bit of aggressive. The promoter got a gun. We didn’t get paid.

  Our early years of European touring often felt like one long drama. In the early seventies it felt like touring round a bunch of different countries whose main aim was to search us as many times as possible. There was one occasion when we’d flown to Switzerland and were detained at Geneva airport: Steve was taken in to a side-room by Customs and I remember clearly the moment when the door swung open revealing Steve in his underpants looking very forlorn. The Swiss didn’t like long-haired bands in those days: we always knew when we got to the Swiss border we were going to be done over.

  Sightseeing wasn’t really possible given our schedule, but Rich could never drive past a lake without taking off all his clothes and going for a swim and getting us to do the same. In Naples we also discovered another therapeutic past time . . .

  Ending a tour with a band row was traditional. The unusual thing about our end-of-tour-row in Naples was that there was a funfair round the corner from the hotel where we were staying. There came a certain point when we were all so sick of each other that we decided the only thing to do was get on the dodgems and bash the hell out of each other repeatedly. I have to say I’ve never known an atmosphere cleared so well.

  * * *

  After Belgium and Italy, England felt like a pretty dour place. It was al
so still largely indifferent to us. Nursery Cryme, which had got to number 39 in the UK, had moved things on for us a bit in terms of sales and profile but not enough for a second album. Strat was determined to keep us in the fold but if he hadn’t supported us, Gail Colson, his assistant, would happily have given us a nudge. She’d once called us ‘posh public schoolboys’, which was funny because she was posh too. Her husband, Fred Munt – a Jack-the-Lad, sorter-outer type – didn’t like us either. He was the Charisma tour manager and, for a PR guy, incredibly truthful: ‘Ah, it’s rubbish, mate. Rubbish.’

  Fred had organized the Six Bob Tour. One night he’d convinced us that we were going to be mobbed leaving the band hotel and that the only way to save us from our public was to climb out of the window and over a ladder on to the waiting bus. We went along with it, but of course when we drove round to the front of the hotel there were only four people there. All of them looking for Lindisfarne.

  Security was something that was never around when you needed it in the early years of our career. By this time I’d already been beaten up by a bunch of Hell’s Angels at a horrible club somewhere: the stage wasn’t very high and there was a bunch of biker boys in the front row who’d start smashing beer bottles on the ground during one of our quiet moments. When the broken glass started coming on the stage I put my guitar to one side and said, ‘Fucking well shut up and listen.’ Or something to that effect. As the Hell’s Angels launched themselves at me, I looked round for backup from my friends and compatriots. I’ve never seen four guys leave the stage so fast.