by Jim Pollard
‘Hold on,’ I said. I removed Jon’s pint from his hand just as it reached his lips and then walked towards the stage with the three beers. I could hear Jon bleating behind me.
‘Far out,’ said the biker when he saw me.
‘Great set,’ I said, handing him the beer. ‘Sorry. Couldn’t afford a Jack Daniels.’
‘Hey. Too bad, man.’ Half the beer disappeared in one draft.
‘Look,’ said Cal. ‘Here’s the point. How much are they paying you tonight?’
‘A score.’
‘I’ll match it.’
‘You’re crazy, man. They’ll give you a gig here if you ask, like.’ He laughed. ‘This dude’ll give anyone a gig.’
‘But it’s got to be tonight,’ Cal said. ‘I’m serious.’
The biker finished his pint. With a sweep of his tattooed arm he wiped the flecks of froth from his beard and moustache. He regarded Cal for a moment - I could see the Carter charm was weaving its spell. ‘Spider, this guy wants to play after us tonight.’
The other hairy one looked up from tuning his guitar. He was taller, painfully slim and his tight black vest had even blacker chest hair peering out of its every opening. He barely looked in our direction. ‘Stuff it.’
‘He’ll pay twenty.’
Painfully Slim turned round. ‘You want to use our gear?’
Cal nodded.
‘You better show us you can play then. Don’t want it damaged.’
He thrust his guitar into Cal’s hands. It wasn’t a make I was familiar with. It looked home-made. It was solid but the body was at least five inches thick - more like a semi-acoustic in that respect. Broad fretboard, scratch plate like a serving dish and dials like upturned tumblers, it was massive in every way, heavy too if Cal’s reaction was anything to go by. Cal negotiated the thick leather strap. His fingertips must still have been painful but he played like he used to - a little bit of Clapton, a dollop of Page. Although the guitar wasn’t plugged in, the other two guys in the band came over to listen.
‘No sweat,’ said Spider when Cal had finished. ‘Five numbers, right. We’ll finish a bit early.’
Cal handed back the guitar. Then he pulled a crisp twenty pound note from his wallet.
‘Far out,’ said the biker. He looked like he’d never seen one before. Like me, I’m sure he’d never owned one.
Spider called after us as we were walking back. ‘What you called?’
We looked at each other and then at Spider. All three of us shrugged.
Back at the table, a fresh round of drinks had appeared. ‘I hope that was worth my pint, Frankie,’ Jon began, a little wounded.
‘It certainly was, Jonathan, my boy,’ said Cal. ‘You wanted to play before we go away and now you will.’
‘Great’ said Jon, finishing the beer that I’d foolishly put down on the table. ‘You’ve got us a gig.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cal. He was starting a new pint. ‘Tonight.’
Jon choked on his ill-gotten liquor. ‘Tonight! Are you mad? I’ve had three pints.’
‘Well have another couple,’ Cal said. ‘Nobody will know the difference.’
There was about half an hour before we went on stage - long enough to phone Wendy and get her to bring Cal’s cassette recorder down. If this was to be a one and only we wanted it for posterity. Now we had the excuse that we were drinking to calm our nerves. Charlie practised on the table-top tapping out rhythms on the beermats and Jon made himself sick in the toilet. He had sneaked into the Ladies so we wouldn’t find him and Cal had had to send Linda in. ‘Come on,’ he said to me and we went out into the deserted beer garden for a couple of joints.
We had discussed a name before. Cal and Jon in their car keys jangling in the pocket phase suggested souped up bulging bonnet sort of names. I’d vetoed them then and did when, through a plume of whitey blue smoke, Cal raised the subject again.
‘Nothing faster than a Go-Kart,’ I said.
‘OK,’ said Cal. And that was it. The Go-Karts. As simple as that. I would love to tell you that it was after a childhood turning point - after a much loved Go-Kart which I crashed and as a result refused ever to drive anything again - but I can’t. There’s no Rosebud in this story. That Cal was both a Carter and a Karter was a coincidence the full impact of which I’m not sure even he appreciated at the time.
The whole performance went like a dream and I mean that in both senses of the word. We were all too drunk to feel anything much even had there been time to get nervous. True Jonathan dropped the bass guitar and Charlie tripped over the hi-hat stand but that was all before we started. From the first chord of ‘Promised Land’ to the last cymbal crash five numbers later we had a great time.
Jon was actually in his element. The bassist in the other band had a smaller scale bass than the one Jon owned which meant it was much easier for him to play. This time, when Cal told him to turn the bass amp up he happily tried to comply. Unfortunately what Spider’s bassist lacked in guitar he made up for in amplification. There were knobs everywhere and none of them seemed to say anything so simple as ‘volume’. Jon looked at it blankly. We were mid-way through ‘Promised Land’ - I’d just played the guitar solo as I had been ever since Cal chopped his fingers off. He sang it now instead. What to do? Cal, still strumming vigorously, wandered over. He shrugged too. So Jon did what Cal had done. Jon kicked the back of the speaker in. This one was somewhat more substantial than his own amp but he managed it eventually: the wood cracking in time with Charlie’s thudding bass drum beat. At this point, the pub punters, bored at best with Biker’s band, came to life. Jenny, Linda and the Bromley crowd came down the front and started pogoing. Jon joined in. Biker’s band came to life more than most. Either he and Spider were dancing or they were hopping mad.
I can’t remember what we played next - ‘Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay’, perhaps - but I know it started with the drums and they sounded great. I had to check to see if it was really Charlie playing. As he rolled around the kit our already receding drummer smiled at me as if he’d just got a joke after a long time. A lesson was being learned. Charlie, in his quest for volume, tightened every skin on his kit until it was as taut as possible; these drums were set-up to provide a specific selection of timbres and pitches. Charlie realised that drums could be tuned. I kicked in with the fuzz-box and another half a dozen people took to the dance floor.
Vandalising the bass speaker had the opposite effect to that which it had had in the garage. Without a wall behind it, the low frequency notes tumbled out of the back to be swallowed up by the room. Jon was still too quiet which, at this stage of our career, was still a bonus. What’s more he was too drunk to notice. The main effect of his playing in the lower registers was to set off the coursing vibration of the delicate wooden stage and through it the floor of the pub. The joint was literally jumping.
By the time we got to ‘Rotten In Denmark’ with Cal and I harmonising and enjoying our first go at separate microphones, the place was livelier than it had ever been before (admittedly not difficult). Down the front the Bromley crowd were doing a dance that basically involved taking your partner by the throat and leaping around violently. Wearing bondage strides made it all the more dangerous. We get wild, wild, wild. The effect of all this was that Biker and Spider et al could not get near the ‘stage’. At the bar I could see them drinking furiously.
When we’d played our five songs there was clapping and cheering and whistling. Linda was roaring for more so Cal obliged. The encore we made up as we went along. It consisted of a backing track of frenetic riffing and Cal yelling ‘Do not adjust your set’ over the top - it was the birth of the number that we later turned into ‘Do Not Adjust Your Scepticism’, our second single.
The power-chord crash ending soaring to a double cymbal crescendo coincided with the time-bell which the landlord was ringing like a campanologist gone crazy. ‘
Time, please,’ he bellowed as the final chord reluctantly expired, ‘Time, please.’
‘Sorry,’ said Cal into the microphone, ‘No Pink Floyd.’ The punks went mad. Meanwhile Biker’s band had cut around the back and were now, even as the audience clapped, pulling Charlie from the drum stool. He still had his feet in the pedals as they wrestled him to the floor. Jon grabbed a bit of wood from the backless speaker cabinet and adopted an Errol Flynn style guard. Charlie managed to poke Spider in the eye with a drumstick. As Spider swung a heavy fist, the crowd stepped back, realising now that this wasn’t part of the act.
‘Grab the lanky bastard’s leg,’ advised Jon.
‘Look, lads, I’m sure we can sort this out amicably,’ Cal said as Biker tried to grab the guitar from him.
‘I’m a guy of peace, love and flowers, but you dudes are bad karma,’ was Biker’s considered response. He went to kick Cal in the testicles at the same time as Linda brought a Double Diamond bottle down his head. I was lost for a moment. I hadn’t had a fight since I was nine and I didn’t know what to do. Biker was on the floor holding his head in one hand and his boot in the other (Cal’s height meant that even the best aimed kick could not reach his bollocks without first hitting the solid wood of the guitar). As I stepped over Biker, his band’s juvenile drummer leapt monkey-like onto my back. One arm around my neck he began punching me in the side of the head with the other.
‘Isn’t he under age?’ asked Jon.
I began screaming and screaming like the tantrum prone offspring of a whirling dervish and a howling banshee, I charged straight towards the toilets. They had been added, as in so many pubs, as an apparent afterthought, and I knew that the top of the door frame cleared my head by just a couple of inches. As my tennis shoe touched down on the tiled floor, the little drummer boy’s head cracked against the jamb like a rim shot and I felt him fall from my back with a thud.
I continued, still screaming, right out of the other door, into the beer garden and back round into the pub that way, slowing down to close the rotting white painted gate and step back onto the High Street just as the police cars screeched over the brow of the hill. I sensed that this was an opportunity that wouldn’t arise again and with a skip in my stride I pushed at the heavy door and stepped back into The Roebuck. Amid the mayhem the one discernible image was of Cal waving the guitar around his head like a shillelagh.
‘It’s the pigs,’ I yelled at the top of my voice.
An hour or so later Cal and I were walking back up the hill. I was nursing a bruise on my cheek. He was lighter still further in the wallet department after settling up for the damage to the amp.
‘Well, the playing bit was great,’ I began.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jon was right. It’s got to be worth doing it again if we can sound like that.’
‘There’s no time, Frankie.’
‘What do you mean? The exams? Well, we can sort that out. We’re quite tight now. Don’t need so much practice.’
‘No, it’s not that.’ Cal stopped walking. We were near the top of the hill. There was just a hint of sadness as he spoke. ‘I’m leaving school, anyway.’
I looked at him. Behind his beacon of blond hair a drizzle of rain was beginning, causing the lights of London to twinkle as they scampered for cover behind the trees.
‘I’m going to America. Linda and I...’
‘How long for?’
‘Maybe for good.’
The king is gone, Johnny Rotten In Denmark …
23
North Wales, 1978
As you will know we recorded the Rotten In Denmark album in Portmeirion in north Wales. It’s a small Italianate village, the architectural whim of an eccentric English gentleman who wanted to be master of all he surveyed. Its pretty combination of shapes and colours and miniature scale - the arches you can just about walk beneath, the doors you can just about enter - give it the feel of walking into a cartoon. Then there are the dense yet cultivated woodlands and the vast bay of a beach with its sun-traps and coves. They used the village as the setting for the very popular but very confusing (and therefore very clever) TV series The Prisoner and that, perhaps more than any of the other reasons, is why Cal’s choice of Portmeirion for our recording session was such a shrewd stroke.
We didn’t do the recording in Portmeirion itself but we made a video and had all the photos taken there. We were staying in a cottage nearby which had a basement and it was this that we used as the studio. With us we took a 24-track mobile recording unit which we parked in the drive. For a while Charlie was trying to persuade us to take Terry Chambers along to operate the thing but Phonodisc weren’t having that. They insisted on a professional so we took Wesley Walker who had operated the tape on our single. We were impressed with him because he’d successfully diagnosed the problem with Jon’s bass sound as arising from a ‘bleeding great hole in the back of the amp’. They were unenthusiastic about the whole idea anyway, Phonodisc. Most first albums are recorded under tight supervision using the label’s house producers and engineers. ‘They think you’re just after a fucking holiday,’ said Tony. ‘Heaven forbid,’ said Cal.
Imagine the five of us in this fantasy village. It was, as Cal later said to some newspaper, ‘like a schoolboy dream.’ But it worked. Cal understood our collective psyche well. In this make-believe land we could make-believe that we were quality musicians recording yet another album. It also worked because if Portmeirion was architect Sir Clough William Ellis’s attempt to play God then the first album, here in this toy-town where his height for once was just right, was Cal’s. Wesley rigged up a voice-back system so that the studio (where the instruments were) and the control room (the back of the mobile where the mixing desk and master tape were) could communicate with each other. With Wesley at his right arm, Cal spent most of the time up there issuing instructions to the rest of us downstairs in the basement, his voice booming with disproportionate size. Usually we recorded the drums first and then Charlie went up to operate the master tape recorder while Wesley engineered and Cal, in his own words, ‘produced’. This left me downstairs to help Jon out with any problems.
The pattern became familiar. Jon fumbles. Cal booms ‘cut’ like some movie mogul. I try to help, showing Jon a different way to play the line or checking he knows exactly what he is trying to do. ‘Can’t I play a different line altogether?’ Jon asks. ‘Play the line that’s written,’ Cal proclaims. ‘Written where?’ Jon mumbles. With each successive take, Cal would get more exasperated and the chances of getting it perfect would recede.
‘Can’t you just drop me in halfway through,’ Jon pleaded on what must have been take twenty or so of ‘Wonderful Moment’.
‘But you’ve only played one fucking bar right, chum,’ came back Cal, ‘and that was a bar rest.’
Jon got up calmly, climbed the stairs from the basement and, chucking his bass guitar into a hydrangea bush as he went, marched off the premises. I found him in a cobbled street in Portmeirion village. He was walking down towards the sea, past the bay window of the bookshop with the vintage petrol pump outside it.
‘Jon,’ I shouted. He was framed by the imposing Jacobean pastiche behind him which was known in the village as the town hall. To emerge from that light-starved basement full of our distorted urban angst to this pageant, this other country, this other century made the drugs that Cal took seem so unnecessary. I squinted at the slim figure in front of me and waved. Here, the sun always seemed to be out whether or not it actually was.
Jonathan managed a smile as if he knew it wasn’t my fault. ‘We thought coming here might make it easier,’ I began, ‘keep you away from the prying eyes of Phonodisc.’ I could see from the way his expression was changing back again that I had said the wrong thing. I tried again. ‘Give you your own space, you know. With friends. Only Wesley…’
‘We?’ he interrupted. ‘We? Frank, do you really think
you matter?’ Then he was walking away again, faster this time, like in a walking race. I laughed but it was uncomfortable. I felt angry now.
‘Jon,’ I called.
‘What?’ he demanded, turning round and bellowing while still walking backwards.
I was going to tell him. Unknown to Jonathan Cal had rerecorded three of his bass-lines already, the pair of us getting up early or staying late on some songwriterly pretext in order to do it. Before we finished the record it would happen again. In fact Jon only actually plays bass on, I think, four tracks on the first album - the rest, uncredited, are Cal. The little man may have been a harsh taskmaster but he was loyal.
I was going to tell Jon but I didn’t. I don’t know why. I could have done - I might have enjoyed it - but I didn’t. ‘Nothing,’ I said, turning my back and walking off in the opposite direction. Cal put it into context at about two that morning. We were redoing ‘Wonderful Moment’ - Cal playing, me recording it. Up in the back of the mobile, I had the headphones on and, after a successful first take, his voice emerged from the cans.
‘He thinks he’s my number two, that’s why,’ said Cal Carter from the basement. Unlike in The Prisoner TV series, there was no question about who was number one. ‘That’s why he’s annoyed that we talk about him. It makes him think that you’re two i/c.’ There was a jokey tone in his voice but more besides.
‘And am I?’ I asked in a little whiskey laced voice.
‘Who cares,’ said Cal. ‘You’ve seen the TV programme haven’t you. Number two is always an administrator, a pen pusher, a know-nothing.’
‘Right,’ I said. I could hear him putting the guitar down so I removed my cans, took another sip from the bottle. The idea that Jon was in some way a rival both excited and appalled me. I could hear Cal’s footsteps first up the stairs and then across the path before he appeared in the control room. Somewhere in the night a car sped past.
‘Your contribution’s a creative one, Frank,’ he said and the fear began to subside. ‘That’s where it all starts.’ He smiled as he leaned over me to rewind the tape machine. ‘Let’s hear that back.’