Next day, September 11, 1974, Mike calls. He’s been sacked.
* * *
Ken calls a meeting at a quintessential English pub in Ealing, just off the Common, on a sunny Sunday afternoon. From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar. Cricket match on the green: the thwack of willow on leather. Such a beautiful setting to waste on an autopsy.
Upshot of it all? Upshot is, c’est tout. That’s it. Ken has run out of doors to knock on. We’re stuffed. Nobody out there in the world wants to sign the Hollywood Brats.*
We have just enough collective ego remaining to bristle and be astounded. What do you mean, nobody? Just, nobody. What about . . . ? No. Yeah, but surely . . . ? No. Not even . . . ? No. Just a resounding, definitive “no.”
On the jukebox in the background, the Faces sing “What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me).”
We drink Guinness and watch the lads in white trousers, caps, and pullovers out there on the green. I’ve no idea what they are trying to achieve. I don’t have a clue about cricket. But they look good doing it. I also have to acknowledge that I don’t have a clue about the music business. But we looked good doing it.
I’m sick of it all and I want to smash my fist through a wall. Not a pub wall, mind you. Something less sturdily built, less knuckle-crunching. A Japanese shoji screen, perhaps. Lots of clatter and ripping paper. To make a point.
We’re all full of some kind of rage.
The next day, the phone is disconnected at Fordhook Avenue. The day after that, a telegram arrives from Worldwide Artists, Dover Street. We are told to vacate the premises with immediate effect and make arrangements to hand back our instruments and amplifiers. Furthermore, we are informed that the Olympic Studios and Majestic Studios tapes, having failed to garner a deal, are to be taped over.
An hour after the telegram arrives, two journalists show up for a pre-arranged interview with Casino and me. Considering the circumstances I can’t decide if the timing is terrible or perfect.
Casino and I have been sharing a bottle of Teacher’s whiskey, no glasses, on the couch in the living room, for an hour before the journalists get here. We are each carrying a bushelful of inter-Brat grievances. Truth is, we’re barely on speaking terms. It is the Brats’ first-ever interview. Luckily, Lou is here to referee.
I’m dressed for the interview in full Cary Grant mode: green silk Chinese bathrobe with accompanying ascot, silver bracelet, and black silk slippers. I have a paring knife and have been using it to slice thin strips off a ripe melon. By the time Jan Friis and his Norse buddy arrive with their notebooks, tape machines, and microphones, the Matheson-Steel Corporation is half-zonked and rapidly closing in on full-zonked status.
The journalists ask a question and we’d both give totally conflicting answers. Then we argue, on tape, about the various points of conflict. Following that, we swear at each other and move farther away on the couch so that they have to reposition the microphones. Then, screw this, I go to sit on the armchair so we can trade insults across the room. What the hell does a piano player know, anyway?
The journalists are looking at each other in astonishment. Finally, Casino staggers from the couch into an upright position and makes some stupid joke. He stands there, laughing. I feel the paring knife in my hand, and he laughs no more.
I wish. Instead, I throw the melon at his head and exit in a huff, stomping, as much as one can in black silk slippers, upstairs, where I slam my bedroom door like Joan Crawford in, well, at least twenty movies.
I am fuming in my attic when there comes a pounding of footsteps up the stairs, and in bursts a rabid Casino followed by a placid Lou followed by a truly interested Jan and his equally fascinated colleague. The room is ten-feet square. There’s a woman in there, too. Dressed in lingerie and . . . tidying up, shall we say? It’s overcrowded. Casino pushes right up to me and, without saying a Norwegian word, he hauls back and socks me in the jaw. Wow. For a man of modest stature he punches like a stevedore. But, as every man knows, you don’t punch another chap in front of a woman dressed in stockings and suspenders. It’s just not on.
Hence I immediately throw a right uppercut that catches him on the left side of his mouth. Lou leaps between us to stop further carnage. Cas and I threaten each other with at least death, Lou holding us apart. Snarling and in pain, I am pleased to see Casino’s mouth leaking the red stuff. Then I look down and notice that my yap is dripping blood all over my Cary Grant gown.
As if that isn’t enough amateur theater for one day, the two journalists go full Viking on each other for failing to get the altercation on tape. I can’t understand them, but judging by the hysterics and implied umlauts it seems that they might also start throwing dukes any second.
Lou Sparks is the only sane person in the house.
* * *
I slink back to Watford and Carole and Brillo kindly take me in. I’m twenty-one, I’m washed up. Lou goes off to the girl in Clapham. We move all the gear to a garage in Camden and put an ad in the Melody Maker: “Great gear, greater prices. Must sell. Being chased by the Mob.”
Dozens, maybe hundreds of musicians descend upon Camden and we sell all our lovely equipment to the top bidder. Need a Hammond, squire? Well, surely you could use a Leslie to go along with that? Lou, alias Mr. Chat, is master of ceremonies, arguing, goading, and charming the pound notes out of the wallets and into a pillowcase that fills up to the brim over the course of the day. Just like he did years ago, flogging records outside Bushey station. Casino and I keep watch up and down the street. On the lookout for you know whom.
Next day, Casino and I stake out the Worldwide Artists office at 27 Dover Street from a vantage point a few doors down, and as soon as all dangerous principals have left for lunch I go inside, taking the stairs two at a time. I breeze through the big doors with my best smile directed right at Mandy, as though hunky has just met dory and everything is fine in the world. I walk straight to the shelf where the two-inch tapes are stored, grab ours, and one cheery wave later I’m back out the door. The whole caper takes 45 seconds.
* * *
Worldwide Artists (a con, a front, a laundry, who knows?) conveniently chooses this moment to implode, and in the ensuing legal and logistical chaos the Hollywood Brats are forgotten. This is a big relief. We want to be forgotten by them right about now.
Brady goes into a complete sulk and quits the band. I’m losing count but I think it’s the third time he’s quit. The nerve. Casino and I invented the little prick. He’ll never be in anything as good as the Brats again. Trouble is, in the witching hours when sleep won’t come I can’t escape the nagging, gnawing feeling that none of us will ever be in anything this good again.
Ken remains steadfast in his belief in the Hollywood Brats. He does, however, throw a fit about the gear being “misplaced.” His knees may have to pay the price.
Weeks of nothing turn into months of less. The disappointment is crushing and weighs on the heart. We thought we had everything. We thought we had the perfect band. We thought we’d made the perfect record. September goes, followed by October. November says, “Don’t look at me, losers.”
Derek goes somewhere and does something. We don’t know. We don’t care. Turns out he was being paid £50 a week while the rest of us were on a tenner. What a joke.
The Brats are reduced to Me, Lou, and Casino. We meet at pubs to laugh and mope, trying to figure out what to do next. We convene at 17 London Street, where we rage at the fates and play our scratchy acetates over and over. Then Lou, my mate through Cross Road, Aldenham Road, Mill Lane, Bishop’s Road, and Fordhook Avenue, decides he’s had enough and goes back to the land of the Micmac. This leaves just the two of us, me and Cas. Right back where we started.
Casino and I meet for a Christmas drink at the Sussex Arms. At the end of the evening he sorts it with the barman that we can take a cognac down the street to the derelict huddled up
on his cardboard bed outside Ladbrokes. We feel good doing it, giving something from the little we have. The spirit of the season fills our rancid little souls.
We hand the drink to him and wish him a very Happy Christmas. He reaches out of his blankets and takes it, with a look on his face like he’s been waiting for it for the last hour and was wondering where we’d got to.
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men
lost their bones
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
1975
I
One morning in Watford, bringing in the milk bottles, silver foil tops pecked by greedy, opportunistic, cream-sucking sparrows, a song comes on the radio called “Geronimo’s Cadillac.” It’s by Claire Hamill. Now, an Apache in a Cadillac is an interesting concept to me so I give it an ear. Afterward, Tony Blackburn informs us that it is on the Konk label. It hits me that this is a record company we have overlooked—and of all the record companies to overlook. Konk Records is relatively new and was started by Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. I love the Kinks. This is perfect.
Later that afternoon I find out the phone number, take a deep breath, and give it a bell. What will I say if Ray answers and says “hello” through that gap in his front teeth? Needn’t have worried. A very nice lady answers and says that they are indeed looking for artists and I should drop a tape off at the office. They’ll give it a listen.
I have a bath, brush every tooth rigorously, polish my shoes, and generally spruce up to tip-top shape. Just before I leave the house with the Hollywood Brats tape under my arm I wonder, Should I? No, don’t be daft, I tell myself. Well, why not? Because it’s not the sort of thing you do, I insist. But you could make an exception just this once, couldn’t you? Oh, all right then. Stop arguing with me. I suppose I could.
I go to my room overlooking the air-raid shelter and the railroad tracks, and from among my meager possessions I pick out my treasured copy of Something Else by the Kinks. It is my favorite record, my absolute Desert Island Disc, and this scratchy copy has been with me forever, or at least it seems that way. During all the bleak times this album was the only one I resisted the urge to sell.
Let It Be, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Back Door Men, Shangri-Las, all the rest, they’ve ended up hocked in pawnshops or sold by Lou outside railway stations. But not Something Else. I could never part with it. It has seen me through many a dark time—living in a bunkhouse while working in the mine, in the Aussie Ghetto in Earls Court and the curry-stench cell in Harrow—and many a pleasant, sunny time, as well. I’m wondering, Is it possible to get Ray to autograph it? Wouldn’t that be something?
It is an expensive hour-and-a-half journey from Watford Junction by Brit Rail, the Tube, and shanks’ mare to get to Konk Records in Hornsey. Thankfully, the very nice lady is behind the desk when I get there, and she duly takes the Brats tape. She also gently eases the embarrassment I feel when I ask if I can get Something Else autographed.
I walk out feeling quite optimistic on both counts.
Two weeks pass like a particularly jagged gallstone. During that period, for conduct unbecoming a houseguest, I am made to walk the plank at 112 Bradshaw Road for the second time in my career. Eventually, covered in seaweed and ignominy, I wash up on the shores of 17 London Street in Paddington, and my old mate and his lass Sonja very graciously pull me to safety. I interrupt their life and sleep on their couch.
Sonja spends her days working hard from early morning until late in the evening at the Duchy Hotel in Lancaster Gate. Casino and I spend our days burning egg and chips on the stove, griping, drinking, bemoaning our fate, and going to Arsenal football matches.
Around about this time, stuck as we are without a breath of wind in the doldrums, Casino cons his way into writing an entertainment column for a newspaper back in Norway. He files his columns every Friday, which is handy because the London music papers come out on Thursday and that allows him to steal every single sentence, so the wheeze doesn’t have to take up a great deal of his time.
What a scam. He gets paid plus he gets journalist credentials, so every week the record companies send all their new releases for him to review. This, of course, he never does. Instead, he takes each week’s stack down the street and sells them to a record shop.
Another angle he’s working is that, since he’s using his maiden name for the newspaper byline, he can drop the handle “Casino Steel” into his columns every now and again, mentioning this up-and-coming musician who’s really making waves in London. So it turns out Casino Steel is making quite a name for himself, especially for a man who’s not making quite a name for himself.
One day, Casino and I come back home after going for a lecture and a free lunch in a hall in Bayswater. There is always one barmy cult or another on Praed Street soliciting society’s zombies to come away with them on buses to their communes in the Pennines. We usually ignore them, of course, but this one offered lunch so, since we were hungry, we said, “Sure.”
The lecture was short but full of words, something about communism and why the BBC needs more state control and why our possessions aren’t making us happy. Fair enough. Then it’s on to lunch. The blackboard says gumbo, which I associate with New Orleans or at least Louisiana or Hank’s “Jambalaya” but which, whatever the case, I have never eaten. It turns out to be a bowl of gelatinous white plastic squares floating in a weak, milky, spiced porridge. Son of a gun, it ain’t big fun. These cults, I tell you.
We arrive back chez Steel to find there is a message. Carole, not one to hold a grudge, has called from Watford, saying Konk Records want to see me anytime after 10 a.m. tomorrow.
We are beyond excited. We go through scenario after scenario. The prevailing one being that the Kinks love us and will be releasing our record next week. I told you my Kinks connection meant something. It was fate, always at my elbow, tugging my sleeve, leading us to this very high-rent intersection where Kinks meet Brats.
Next morning, bathed and primped, I set off, on a return ticket from Paddington station. Not to seem overly eager, I present myself at Konk Records in Hornsey at half past ten. A deep breath, a couple of them actually, and through the doors I go. The selfsame very nice lady smiles brightly as I approach the desk. All the way here on the Tube I’ve been rehearsing the perfect opening line. And I’ve got a great one. I open my smiley mouth; however, she beats me to it. She reaches behind her, grabs our tape, and hands it to me. “I’m sorry. This is not what we’re looking for at the moment.”
In that instant, eighteen hours of Matheson-Steel hopes and dreams shatter like a champagne-glass pyramid at a Penthouse Christmas party. My smile goes rictus. I summon every reserve I have to try to maintain a modicum of composure.
The very nice lady continues in script form, a script not even personally tailored for me: “We do thank you so much for considering us and we wish you all the best in the future.”
I feel nauseous. I reach out my hand, slowly take the tape, and murmur something—“Thanks, oh, okay”—something useless and, wanting nothing more than to disappear into a hole in the floor, I turn to go.
Then I remember. I turn back. God, this is embarrassing. I ask, “Um, I was just wondering . . . about . . . the record I left?”
She looks up from the hugely important task she just had to attend to five-hundredths of a second after that wish-you-all-the-best-in-the-future line. “Sorry?” She’s all fluttering eyelashes.
“Yeah. The record. I . . . uh . . . I left a record to be . . . I don’t know . . . autographed or something?”
“Record?”
“Yeah, Something Else. It’s okay if it’s not . . . if it couldn’t . . . I just want it back.”
“Record. You left a record? Here?”
I nod. This is excruciating. If you knew me you’d know just how painful this is. “Yes, I gave it to you and asked if it was possible to have it autographed. It’
s no big deal now. I just want to get out of here. I’ll just take it and go.”
“You gave it to me? Well, that doesn’t ring a bell. Let me just ask if anyone has seen it. What was it called, you said?”
“Something Else.”
“And it’s of course by . . . ?”
“The Kinks.”
“Of course. Let me just check.”
She calls somebody and somebody checks with another somebody, and through all these torturous somebodies I listen to her say things into the phone like, “No, no neither have I,” and, “No, she hasn’t seen anything like it,” and, “Well, of course. Well, we’d have noticed, wouldn’t we?” All of which leads nowhere. She hangs up the phone, sighs politely, and goes back to the script.
“I’m so sorry. Nobody seems to know anything about it. Now, you’re sure you . . . yes, yes, of course you’re sure. Well, if it turns up I’ll let you know.”
And then I leave.
I walk aimlessly down some street for a while and then sit down on a bench near a park. It is 10:39 a.m. Nine minutes for that.
Konk Records
Hornsey
Nice lady
Response?
No
* * *
How could we be so stupid? How could we get our hopes up like that, after all we’ve been through? The message “anytime after 10 a.m.” said it all. Anytime after 10 a.m. is anytime between 10:00 a.m. and the end of the world. And even then they wouldn’t care, would they? “Uh-oh, world’s blowing up. Did the Hollywood Brats pick up their tape?”
Sick On You Page 31