by Tyla Pallas
God knows why I was singing that but I guess it helped. Next thing I remember was seeing my Dads face upside down.
- Well well, what have you been up to now then? He enquired
- Twenty-one, twenty-two. Twenty-two stitches, which should hold it, that should do young un. Said the Surgeon.
- Nurse would you care to bandage this young man up please?
We got back to the house and there waiting was the whole street. All I was worried about was the fact that they had had to cut my right sleeve off of my beloved purple tracksuit top, and all my blood had dried on to it all hard and solid black looking blood now.
- Oh did anybody check on Gary?
In all the commotion and fuss no one had thought what had happened to Gary. What had in fact happened was that he had stood there in shock for a while and then gone home. He came back later in the afternoon and brought me some Matchmaker mint chocolate biscuit sticks after my Mum had called his mum to see if he was alright. He was in shock I think.
I had the next week off school. But I couldn’t do much my wrist killed and it took weeks to get it all okay. The worst part was having the stitches out. They didn’t dissolve like they do these days. It bled again and then scabbed over which as a nine year old you can’t help but pick. Until I got a tattoo over it many years later it was quite a scar in the shape of an ‘n’ I still have an inbuilt fear of glass doors, especially frosted ones and seeing kids run into them with gay abandon gives me the chills.
Mid 80’s I had a quitter of a sock that kept sliding under my foot so every couple of feet when it annoyed me enough I would have to stop and either fumble down inside my boot to pull it up, or remove my boot completely to remedy the ongoing situation. Socks = the Bain of my life. And so it was at approx. 4 or 5 am that I was making my way up Wardour St W1 that I came upon an early newspaper delivery outside a soon to open newsagent. I undid the blue plastic bag helped myself to the Times newspaper and tied the bag back up. Folded under my arm an strolled up the road towards Oxford street, destination unknown. It was then that I became aware that I was being followed. Slightly concerned I looked over my shoulder, as a few weeks back I’d had a bit of bother with two gentlemen of the skinhead breed and had to leg it. This time however it was two men in Blue, again. So I casually slipped the Times into a passing bin, or rather the bin I was passing.
- Just a moment Sir. One of them called out.
I stopped and did an about turn.
-Who me? I said standing under the street light. We were the only three figures in the night.
-Yes you sonny Jim, is this yours? Said Plod pulling the Times out of the bin.
-Not anymore. I snidely replied.
-What you got down your boot.
-Me foot.
- Allo tango mustard ketchup, can we get a car please? Over. Said Dixon of Dock green into his shoulder.
Within seconds a mini metro peeled round the corner on two wheels and screeched up next to us, out jumped Bodie and Doyle.
-What’s the charge Sarg.? Said Bodie
-Possession and intent to distort the cause of justice.
-If you’d like to accompany us to the station Sir. Said Doyle and all five of us squeezed in the motor an sped off round to Savile Row Nick.
It was quite a funny as we were all large boned blokes and it was a bit keystone cops, them either side of me with their helmets on their laps.
Inside they took down all my particulars and emptied my pockets, which amounted to two pages of content’s - as I was currently between living quarters and had not found a couch or a bed for this cold night.
But by far the worst bit of luck I ad with plod was in Scandinavia once again. It all started with me going to see Marilyn Manson at some sports arena and me drinking whisky didn’t help.
By the time we reached the nightclub it was all getting rather messy. I remember some woman coming up to me an ask me if she could have the stool I was sitting on while my girlfriend went to the loo. Her line was.
- I’ve been working all day.
To which I replied
- I’ve been working all my life.
- Oh Please I really have been standing all day. She begged I was about to give up the stool when….
My Ladyfriend returned and with out a word just smacked this woman in the face! I was quite taken aback as the woman retaliated and they began a massive cat fight right there in front of me this eventually spilled onto the dance floor and then other people began joining in namely this one bloke who grabbed my girlfriend round the neck- I in turn jumped on the blokes back and we fell to the floor. At this point I remember the whole scene went from bad to worse and now I was being man handled by a load of blokes who turned out top be the Police. Within seconds they had managed to hog-tie me and carry me down a flight of stairs out into the night and bundle me into the back of a waiting Police van. While I sat there I could view my girlfriend being carried out in the same way except she was bundled into the front of the van, well I say the front but the seats behind the driver and passenger. She was laid down on the floor and the coppers got in where swearing at her while they stamped on her with her boots. I was helpless in the back except for my tongue so I was shouting obscenities at them and making idle threats. The Policeman in front of me held my head in an arm lock so I could barely breathe yet alone yell. They drove us around for a short time and when we arrived at the station where we were unceremoniously stripped and thrown in separate cells for the night. The next day we were charged with causing and affray and ordered to come to court in a month’s time to be dealt with. Well the court case was a fiasco. All these witnesses turned up saying they had had this broken or that ripped. The Police turned up and swore on the bible that they had not harmed a hair on either of our heads.
We both got a fine and suspended sentence.
But the prosecutions were not happy with that they were after a Jail term and so took it to the court of appeals. My lawyer suggested, as I wasn’t of Scandinavian citizenship that I might want to consider leaving the country to avoid any well - Jail.
I took his advice and moved far far away from the snow to the land of the peseta.
Now we’ve all drawn on someone when they are asleep, had it done to myself on a few occasions, one being nail varnish not only on my nails but my hands and feet. The skin I mean. Painful to remove. So imagine this. Bill a mate of ours from way back would drink a bottle of vodka and pass out, as you would, its amazing he never died. So one day I got a bottle of Tippex and painted the whites of eyes on his eyelids, as well as some pretty good eyeballs out of black marker pen. When he came round he was furious and punched me very hard. I deserved it but the laughter dulled the pain.
Another time we emptied out our Roadie Steve’s bag of his clothes and wrapped about 4 house bricks in his T-shirts. They even got through customs and made it to France. I think he even paid excess baggage on it. Imagine the hotel finding four London house bricks in his bathroom bin. That would have had a few heads a scratching eh?
And the time Scabs our sound guy swallowed a big chunk of hash which he planned to shit out in Japan and smoke found that the bag had burst and he started freaking out half way across Russia and managed to pull the inside window out on the plane and then lock himself in the plane toilet so they had to take the door off to get him out crying he was.
We rolled a big snowball once and carried it on the tour bus and rammed it in his bunk when he was a kip. That freaked him out as well, he had been dreaming about being buried alive of all things. But no more so than the time we all spat in a condom and with the aid of a pencil put it up his bum and removed the pencil leaving the condom hangin’ out a bit, when he had passed out on pints of Jack Daniels contest. It took him months to come to terms that he had had anal sex with what we told him was a German transvestite who he had also proposed to.
- Don’t you remember Scabs he/she wanked you off under the table in that bar in Amsterdam for £25
They are happily ma
rried now and live by the seaside up north England.
This following story has nothing to do with practical jokes.. When the Eurostar came out in the 90s it wasn’t so airport like with all the metal detectors and what have ya. They had a table on the platform and randomly picked people who looked like they could be up to no good. Me.
I was coming from France. Id had a bit of a bad tour of France and one thing led to another and I ended up out of my head on smack in Paris for a few weeks, but I had to go back to the UK because I had promised my sister I would look after her house and Dogs while the family went on holiday for a fortnight. I had a couple of grams of Heroin in my wallet and in my book I was reading about Peter Perret from The Only Ones I had cut up pieces of foil to smoke it off on the journey, in the loo of course. So the custom bloke pulls me over.
-May we have a look in you bag Monsieur? Your ticket please and passport.
The usual procedure. So he’s flicking through my book but by coincidence every time he flicks by a page with foil on he looks straight up at me and misses the foil. He looks through my wallet and again somehow manages to completely miss the wraps of heroin. My lucky day. I had a good old smoke on the train, in the loo of course but I don’t even remember how I got to Wolves. I looked after the Dogs and the house, no accidents, this time.
I’m so glad they don’t let you up on the flight decks of planes anymore. One time I was so drunk when they allowed me up there I nearly took us down into the Pacific Ocean by waving my arms around telling the captain a crap joke. Imagine the black box…
-..And so he said that’s from the bloke who shat in my trousers…ha! ha!ha!...Aaaarggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!
And I drove the tour coach once down Route 66. Glen our driver when he wasn’t showing us all his gun collection or telling us off for altering the sign on the front of the bus to ‘BASTARDS’ in moment of being nice to us - let me after several pints of bourbon drive the tour bus. Good job it was a straight road eh. Could have been where I came up with the title.
Straight !!$%*!
Considering our first demos cost somewhere in the region of £100 for about four or five songs in about a day and then our first album cost somewhere in the region of £10,000 pounds. For a couple of weeks work. How we managed to spend in excess of $250,000 recording our ‘Straight!!$%*’ Album was well quite understandable. First off pick a producer who was in the region of $50,000, but to be honest even he chipped in some of his wage in the name of entertainment get a couple of assistant engineers at between £10,000 and $15,000 each. Get the band on $2,000 dollars a month spending money bung in a few backing vocalists and Ian McClaglan rattling off a few tunes on the old Joanna which included a lesson on how to make an upright piano sound honky tonk with the help of 88 drawing pins. Get a bar tab or two, refreshments for the studio, oh yes the studio, that’s got to be $1,000 a day, and there were a few of them. Damages, well there was the favourite microphone of Rod Stewart and also the one Tina Turner had sang a few classics on getting broken with a $10,000 bill reduced to $2,000 for good bartering by the producer. One mattress sliced in half and one apartment window replaced oh and a $28,000 video shoot complete with trailers a full film crew and Police escort. For ‘Victims of Success’ if you must know. A few flights back and forth to LA and London. Well it all adds up doesn’t it? In the end I thought we had made a pretty fine album and still do to this day, but of course at the time we had gone from cool underground to chipping away at commercial success, which is the main aim of any artist who is hoping to carve out a career in music business. If you want to keep your day job and do the occasional pub gig for drinks every other weekend then so be it. But if you want to live happily ever after while the royalties overflow into your bank account and the offers pile up at your front door, or should I say your Management and Agents and PRs phones ring off the hook then you have to have a different approach. The label and the publisher are plowing money into the band in a hope of a return and we the band have to be serious about this whilst also appear to be living the hedonistic life style. ‘The Wild men of Rock.’ It’s your job to cause a stir, how you go about it is your decision. Good time rock n roll bands vent outlets for both themselves and their audiences. It’s how long you can hold on to the reigns of madness that all this entails is the question. Everybody including myself has a breaking point once you have over stepped the mark of no return. How much can one possibly drink, how many drugs can one take, how many girls can you get in your hotel room, how many fights can you have with their husbands or boyfriends, how many things can you break. Just how fucking nuts can you be and still think it’s the norm to crash that car and set it on fire. Just how normal is it to drink a pub dry in a week and demand more ale! And that Malibu and coke just doesn’t cut it. How sensible is it to take Angel dust, smoke insane amounts of pot, snort grams of high quality cocaine, drink two litres of Jack Daniels and then go and do a gig that ends up with you slicing yourself in half with a broken bottle to check if you are actually human after all. Get carted off to hospital to get stitched back together be asked by the Police if you intended to commit suicide and then get in a car drive round to you managers house at 6am to demand more money so you can go to the liquor store and buy another two litres of JD to help kill the pain on top of the extra strong painkillers, then go and visit your personal doctor to get stronger painkillers while you have him fill out your green card forms and sign on the dotted line agreeing that you are not insane or libel to be a danger to the US Government. How normal is that life. When you go to bed as it gets light but not before filling a tumbler with JD and coke and putting it in the fridge to be available on waking two hours later. Then when you finally keel over and are rushed to hospital with stomach ache to be told that your own stomach is eating away at its self because in all this craziness you actually forgot to eat any of the food you ordered.
So you quit drinking but still smoke 40 cigarettes a day and spliffs and now drink gallons of coffee and tea. Your arguing with your management your band, yourself always about money, money, money, must be funny, not.
Lets have a break and sort this mess out shall we. Meanwhile the Label release a ‘best of’ and the press jump on it. Oh they have finally run out of steam. By the time its all sorted out two years has passed and you have to start all over again. You can’t fill the big places you sold out two years ago, but you can ram the little gigs to the rafters. Back come the good live reviews, back comes the radio play, oh look were doing the Radio 1 road show in Blackpool and we meet Status Quo. We tell them of our new managers. Their new manager raises his head to the heavens. There is talk of missing millions. We play sell out gigs in the UK, Europe and Japan. Then one day it all ends. The label won’t back us anymore. We cannot for neither love nor money get our albums or singles any higher than number 30. The band fractures into two then three then four, then two countries then three… the silence. No one talks. No one listens. Time fades, as do memories. Occasionally there will be a flash from the past a glimmer of hope. Then like the tide it goes out and like the sun it sets and you think to yourself did I imagine all of that, was it some sort of dream? How normal was that life? I’m glad I did it, but I wouldn’t want it back. Imagine sitting in the back of a van with no windows being driven so fast you are being thrown from side to side, you eventually fall asleep but are woken by the same feeling still being thrown from side to side, not in control of your own destiny. A never-ending rollercoaster ride. How normal is that life? How normal is your life? What is normal?
You hear the crowd roar. You open your eyes. You play that first chord. You walk up to the microphone and you sing from your soul. That’s how normal your life is. That is normality. If that’s what you truly want. Just ask yourself that question.
BIOGRAPHY
Tyla was created and Born in Portsmouth England 1961. He grew up in Wolverhampton, and emigrated to London in 1980 in search of the Holy Grail of Rock n Roll of which he still occasionally looks under various stones for….
<
br /> He dreamt up the idea of The Dogs D'Amour after eating a very self spiced Pot Noodle, in the days before Bombay Bad Boy and unleashed them onto an unsuspecting and somewhat mediocre UK music scene during the mid 1980's. With their ramshackle pirate-meets-Dickens style they pioneered a unique combination of glam-punk and Stonesque rock'n'roll. They sang songs about sweet sorrows and told torrid tales of self destruction – all hallmarked with their ‘do-or-die’ attitude.
Their style stood out from the rest - as did their iconic artwork created by frontman Tyla, who’s unmistakable illustrations of mischievous rock n’ rollers up-to-no-good adorned the bands album covers and sleeves. If Charles Bukowski was the prose and poetry of the drunks, junkies and lonely hearts, then this was their soundtrack.
The Dogs D'Amour played their debut gig in London, England on April 12th 1983. After support slots with Lords Of The New Church, Johnny Thunders and a few of line-up changes as well as a debut album “The State We’re In” (released in 1984 and now much sought after), the band repaired to England where initial minor label interest sparked the release of a self-financed single “How Come It Never Rains”. Finally in 1987 the band were offered a deal by China Records.
The Dogs D'Amour resurfaced with a line-up of Tyla (vocals, guitar), Jo Dog (guitar), Steve James (bass), Bam (drums) and enjoyed considerable UK chart success with ‘In The Dynamite Jet Saloon’, the album eventually garnering two hit singles, it was 1988 and suddenly the Dogs D’Amour vagabond chic was everywhere. The album was followed up by an acoustic mini album entitled ‘ A Graveyard Of Empty Bottles, the year after that entered the UK album charts at No.16. Errol Flynn reached number 22 followed by Straight on which tour ther were supported by a great but then quite unheard of Black Crowes and after a 2 year holiday in California saw them return to mainland Europe with the brilliant ‘More Unchartered Heights Of Disgrace’. Then once again as all pirates do they sailed into the sunset.
In 1994 Tyla started to focus heavily on his solo career and formed his label the aptly named ‘King Outlaw’ as a vehicle for his ever-burgeoning song writing. ‘The Life and Times of a Balladmonger’ was the first album to appear on the label (KOCD01) and 19 more solo and Dogs records and DVD’s have since been released including the critically acclaimed ‘Lullabies For Tough Guys’, ‘‘Flagrantly, Electrically, Acoustically Yours (with Spike – The Quireboys) and 2010’s ‘Bloody Hell Fire’. As well as 2011’s very well received ‘Quinquaginta’