Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  Derek and I get a lesson from the harbormaster. He is a gruff old bird who teaches us the finer points of sailing the thing and, at 4 p.m., in freezing drizzle and with a wind out of the northeast, we cast off. Away we sail, north, I think, under a low bridge and off into the gray, drenched English countryside.

  Lou has painted a sign, “HMS BRATS,” which we hang off the stern.

  Shipboard duties are delegated according to our various talents.

  Andrew: Pilot, captain, on the bridge, ship’s wheel always in steady hands.

  Derek: Backup pilot.

  Casino: Navigator, map reader, locating ports of call, most importantly pubs, along the way.

  Lou: Chief Cook and Bottle-washer, responsible for supplies, in charge of the galley.

  Brady: Portosan patrol, emptying and cleaning toilet.

  Half an hour into the voyage, all of us are blind drunk. Half an hour after that, Casino falls overboard. Well, he was tearing about the deck, in the rain, leaning over the railing swearing at swans, swigging from a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, singing, and all this while wearing six-inch heels. Of course he went overboard.

  It is a well-documented scientific fact that it is almost impossible to pull a fully clothed, hyperventilating Norwegian out of a canal in a storm when one is laughing uncontrollably. All of us take turns trying but it is just too much, and we’re about to give up and unwittingly fulfill Casino’s desire for a death in the band when, with one last desperate heave, he flops on deck like an exhausted tuna, gasping for air.

  Eventually, with great effort, he turns over and, on his elbows, begins crawling toward the cabin. He travels no more than fifteen feet before we regain our composure enough to mosey on over and assist him through the doors and on to a bunk.

  Once we have stopped giggling and Casino is wrapped up dry and groaning, we assess his physical state. Turns out he has suffered a broken ankle and a badly ruptured ego. There is no choice. He must be marooned at the next pub.

  The night is spent bobbing up and down on the waves, comparing Casino’s rapidly swelling purple ankle to how it looked an hour ago, taking photos of it for said comparison, watching Lou do amusing impressions of Cas falling overboard, and getting even more sloshed.

  The next day, from his bunk, Casino plots a course for the Fisheries Inn, many leagues hence, where we have arranged for Ken to meet us so that we can offload our wounded comrade. And so, after a hearty breakfast of four aspirins and three bowls of Frosted Flakes each, we set sail. Late in the afternoon, the Fisheries is spotted off the port bow, so we take ’er in and drop anchor.

  Ken has brought a mock-up of the poster with him and it looks great. At least the local lasses seem to think so, as Brady shows it to them fifty times. Many pints are sunk, tales are told, more photos of Casino’s ankle are taken, and finally Ken, drunk, staggering, and barely coherent, loads our gimp keyboard player into his MG, grinds a few gears until he locates what at a pinch might charitably be called “first,” and swerves off jerkily down the road toward London.

  The rest of the voyage is nothing but worsening weather, thousands of back-breaking locks to traverse, much drinking in many pubs, and random attacks from the savage tribes we encounter along the way. At one point things get so desperate that Mike (“for anything else, call Mike”) is summoned from London to meet us at a pub near where the Zambezi River intersects with Leighton Buzzard locks and deliver us a brown envelope of tenners and a modest square of hashish.

  We come to, of all things, a totem pole. Our resident Micmac gets off the boat and does a ceremonial dance around it, just like I always imagined our drummer would.

  Old salt though I am, I’m finally convinced to take a break after countless hours of sailing through sleet, rain, and occasional hail. I hand Brady the wheel while Lou serves us a quick cup of tea and beans on toast in the galley, a much-welcome respite. A respite, however, that lasts a mere four minutes before the door opens and Brady calmly announces, “Ah, chaps, we’re going to crash.” A prediction that proves uncannily accurate, as one second later he sails us head-on and at full speed into the side of an ancient stone bridge. Dishes, bottles, Hollywood Brats, beans on toast—everything flies everywhere to the outraged yells of fellow canal enthusiasts, smoke filling the cabin, and a nasty smell from the Portosan. The last of which, as soon as things are wrestled under control and once again calm, Brady is sent to deal with, following his demotion from pilot duty.

  Finally, a week later, soaked, hungover, and having suffered 20 percent casualties, we limp back to Watford, bruised but not broken, where a welcome-home party breaks out.

  * * *

  But something has gone awry in the music realm. Hollywood Brats momentum has slammed into a wall. Life is still a blast, but intense rehearsing and swanning around town socializing can’t disguise the fact that we wrapped up the album a few weeks ago and thus far there are no plans to ship it into record shops and get it zapping up the charts. This calls for a meeting with Ken.

  Casino and I meet him for a glass or two at the Warrington in Maida Vale. After our senses are suitably softened Ken lets us in on a little something we didn’t previously know. Worldwide Artists is not, in fact, a record company.

  Wait a minute.

  We thought it was. In fact, signing those recording contracts they put in front of us gave us the distinct impression that it was, indeed, a record company.

  But alas, no. They are a production company. Sort of. They produce the records and then lease the tapes to real record companies who turn them into vinyl and finagle them into the charts. Oh. While this is sinking in, Ken says we’re going to play some gigs, and he hands us an envelope containing £250, which is £50 each for clothes. This has the desired effect: distracts us, shuts us up.

  One of the bands under Worldwide Artists’ banner is a four-piece leaden rock outfit called Stray. They come replete with the usual hair, denim, and solos. They’re probably saving up for their first gong. The pecking order at 27 Dover Street seems to be Black Sabbath, the Goundhogs, and then Stray. I don’t think the Brats are actually on the pecking order.

  Stray appear to be a pet project of Wilf’s, and he even produced their last album, Mudanzas, which, if my Spanish serves me well, means, “Hey, Pedro, the basement’s flooded.”

  Nonetheless, the album went goldish and now they are doing a short tour in England. Ken wants us to be the support act. First gig, Cleethorpes. Never heard of it.

  Ken scoops us up in a hire car and drives for what seems like hours to Cleethorpes, which turns out to be a seaside town in Lincolnshire. The hall is big and the gig is well advertised around town. Well advertised if you are Stray, that is. There is no mention of the Hollywood Brats on any of the posters.

  Still, we don’t give a toss, really. We’re just here to please Ken, shake off the ring rust, and get ready for our next chapter. We waltz in and Louie and Mike have got us set up and ready to shake. Ken asks if we’d like to meet Stray. What a comedian.

  In our dressing room there is beer and whiskey that we are compelled to taste test at length for quality assurance. Quick soundcheck, with Stray standing at the back wall checking us out, muttering into each other’s ears. Who cares?

  Back in the dressing room, we drink and show each other the glad rags we all bought with our fifty-nicker clothing allowance. Everybody has purchased fantastic threads, shirts, scarves, jackets, junk jewels, strides, and daisies. Everybody, that is, except bass boy.

  Derek has had specially tailored a two-piece white silk disco atrocity with bell bottoms and scoop sleeves that even Björn and Benny from ABBA would find embarrassing.

  Showtime. “Mach schau,” Brady and I say to each other, a good-luck charm we learned from reading about the Beatles in Hamburg. Out of the wings and onto the stage. It’s hard to believe, but this is the first time we’ve hit the boards since the Speakeasy. That seems like an ice-age ago
.

  That was then, this is wow. “Melinda Lee” is yesterday’s papers. It’s “Tumble with Me” time. Casino starts it off on piano, followed by the thud of Lou’s bass drum. The curtain opens, the place is packed, yokels drop jaws, then we’re all in and socking ’em between the ears. We play for half an hour and the sea-siders don’t have a clue what’s going on. If you’re a bloke and you wear makeup in this town, you’re facedown under the pier with a mouthful of seaweed next morning.

  It’s obvious some of them like us, but the majority don’t know what to make of “Sick On You” or “Then He Kissed Me” or anything else we play, for that matter. We like it, though. That’s what counts. All that rehearsing has paid off. We’re confident and cocky.

  We keep going. No chitchat, no attempt to engage, just keep smacking ’em around the chops with our particular noise. And what do you know? After the last number Cleethorpes is baying for an encore. We don’t do encores but it’s the thought that counts.

  They don’t stop. It’s early evening so it’s not like they just don’t want to go back to their fishing huts. They’re stomping and yelling. They want the Brats back onstage.

  Stray? Hey, we’re your warm-up act. So they’re warmed up.

  Follow that, pussies.

  Ken is rather pleased by our efforts. In fact, he’s frothing-at-the-mouth rabid. I’ve never seen him so excited. He does a bit of redecorating.*

  * * *

  We hear from Ken that Stray hate us. Hate is such a withering emotion. All we did was ignore them. Still, they’re stuck with us. We’re playing another gig with them a few days later at Plymouth Polytechnic. It’s a long way to Plymouth so Louie arrives to pick us up in a campervan complete with bunk beds, a couch, and a sink. It is 10 a.m. Casino, bless him, has brought along a couple of bottles of Old Grand-Dad for stage props. By 11 a.m. one bottle has been drained dry and we are on the lager, utterly crazed.

  I am armed with a crocodile water pistol and, from my vantage point on the top bunk, I squirt the chaps as they whip out their tackle to slash in the sink. Drinking, singing, pissing, and squirting in such manner, to the delight of passing motorists, the miles go whizzing by.

  We stop for petrol and Louie takes a photo of us in front of the pumps, Old Grand-Dad and water pistol in evidence. Life is but a frolic.

  The polytechnic has a big auditorium and a stage to match. The accountancy student with the clipboard and Castro beard lisps that the place is sold out. Good. So it should be. We head to the dressing room and, horrors, it is just that: a dressing room, singular. We are sharing with Stray. Nice room, though, a long rectangle with actual makeup mirrors all along one wall, surrounded by lights. Stray is down that end and we, by process of elimination, are up this end.

  Stray’s stage denim, as opposed to their street denim, is hanging up neatly, and there is a large crate of bottled beer on the floor in front of the mirror. That’s it.

  We watch their soundcheck and they do go on a bit, kindly using up most of the allotted time and leaving us a miserly ten minutes. This drives Mike and Louie crazy but it doesn’t faze us. We run through a quick “Tumble” and then escape the polytechnic to find a pub.

  Hours later, we get back to the dressing room in plenty of time to get all mugs slathered and finery fitted. Stray lurk in their end of the room trying desperately to be the headlining act, but we refuse to play along. We are loud, politely inebriated, whipping each other up, fighting for mirror space as usual, even though there’s miles of it, stepping into outlandish outfits, and just generally acting as though we are marvelous. Our worst crime, though, continues to be that we completely ignore the headlining act.

  Ken stations himself between the two camps, making with the nonstop chatter peppered with the occasional apologetic shrug.

  Then it’s “Mach schau” time. And this week “Melinda” gets a reprieve. The set is tailored for end-of-year students who might want to strut their West Country stuff, such as it is: “Melinda Lee,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Tumble with Me,” “I Ain’t Got You,” “Another School Day,” “Chez Maximes,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Southern Belles,” and “Sick On You.”

  * * *

  The first song seems to smack them stupid. They stare, they gawk like we’re a five-car pile-up featuring decapitations. After “Melinda Lee” we go straight into “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and I can spy in the audience a little shake here and a little shimmy way over there. Some dig it. Most don’t get it. Beautiful. Just like old times.

  “Then He Kissed Me” drives the straw-chewers and the rugby players and the straw-chewing rugby players mad with bloodlust. And finally, Plymouth Polytechnic seems to take “Sick On You” as a personal critique. At the last thundering note and crash of the cymbals, things get flatteringly dangerous and then we’re off.

  Behind us we can hear that the audience is split: the 40 percent comprised of hicks with chicks appear not only to detest us, but also to think we should be beaten up immediately; the 40 percent made up of wine-soaked single babes are agitated, on estrogen overload, and squealing; the remaining 20 percent, the repressed, suicidal, leather-jacketed, night-crawling loners (our core audience) are howling for more. So we conclude, all in all, a job well done.

  We pass Stray in the hallway and it takes a monumental humanitarian effort for me not to quote Casino and say, “Follow that, pussies.” However, I’m not a monumental humanitarian so I can’t help it. “Follow that, pussies,” I say out of the side of my mouth as we pass them in the narrow hallway. They go crying to Ken.

  Then Stray limp onto the stage.

  Back in the dressing room, we discover that squirts from the crocodile water pistol make the lights surrounding the mirrors explode with a satisfyingly noisy bang, tiny shards of glass flying everywhere. There are dozens of lights. Everybody wants a go.

  Once we are cleaned up and just about to leave the now near-dark dressing room, Casino walks over to Stray’s beer crate, sitting on the floor, bottles chilled and awaiting Stray’s triumphant return. He straddles the crate, whips out his Nordic joy-bringer, and urinates back and forth over all the bottles.

  When we stop laughing long enough to be able to walk, we head out to the campervan and the long haul back to London.

  * * *

  Next day, Ken wants a chin-wag so we all meet at Casino’s local, the Sussex, down the end of London Street. Casino has preceded us there and is suitably lubricated when we arrive, telling a ribald tale of an afternoon in a brothel called “The Oak Room,” nearby in Lancaster Gate. Perhaps we should alert our landlord.

  A couple of pints in and Ken, with maximum wrist-waving and hair-tousling, finally gets to the point. And what a point it is. He tells us that we are a hair’s width away from a deal with Atlantic Records. Well, this causes an eruption of unhatched-chicken counting. Celebratory cognacs are ordered on Ken’s tab and excited babble ensues. What color is the label of an Atlantic record? Lou knows, red. Who’s on Atlantic that we like? Humming and hawing, staring at ceiling and beer-stained carpet until Lou, again, remembers J. Geils. Yeah, we like J. Geils, fat, fuzztop harmonica player and Peter Wolf’s beard notwithstanding.

  The Hollywood Brats on Atlantic Records. Yeah, that’ll do.

  * * *

  Yet another gig with the increasingly morose Stray, this time at a college in Yeovil. What’s with these guys? How can they stand us? We’re wiping the floor with them every night. Why haven’t we been sacked? And where on earth is Yeovil? Nobody knows for certain. What’s near there? Nobody knows. There must be some recognizable town near there. We look it up on a map. Oh, sure, there’s Odcombe, Over Compton, Barwick, and Clifton Maybank. Why didn’t you say so?

  Yeovil is almost as far away from London as Plymouth. Same campervan, same shenanigans, only this time our mate Brillo is along for the ride. To keep our spirits up Ken shows us a letter that the office received from Plymouth Polytechn
ic. Stray are being billed for seventy-two lightbulbs and “janitorial services.”

  This college in Yeovil is the same gig as Plymouth, really: Che Guevera with a clipboard; same drama backstage, same set, same audience reaction. Stray even have a crate of beer in the dressing room. Didn’t they notice?

  On the trek back to London we tell Ken, “That’s enough.” The way we’re going, the next gig will be in the Outer Hebrides. We were doing better playing the Café des Artistes once a week. At least we were in London, music capital of the planet, building momentum, playing to jammed houses, signing pink plastic Japanese handbags for pink plastic Japanese sex bombs.

  That’s it. We’re not doing this anymore. Stray will be heartbroken, but we can’t help that.

  Next afternoon, we hear from Atlantic Records. They have somehow managed to resist the urge to offer us a record contract. How can this be?

  The drunken, stoned, unannounced midnight visits from our landlord, Mr. Beauregard, are taking on downright Tonton Macoute overtones. And he’s starting to ask where the furniture went. So we scarper. Brady squats contentedly on Boundary Road while Derek throws in his lot with Lou and me, and the office finds us a great pad on Fordhook Avenue in Ealing.

  Casino and I don’t spend as much time together as we once did. We used to write all the time and walk around, broke, for hours, planning and scheming, nursing a cup of coffee, listening to music. Those days are gone. The album is written, produced, in the can. These days, when we get together it’s only to worry and bicker and wonder what’s going on with Worldwide Artists. We’re frustrated and snarl at each other over the slightest thing. We’ve made the album we wanted to make. The one we’ve been working toward since the church hall in leafy Stanmore. So why is nothing happening? We’re stupid. We take it out on each other.