By midday the miners had sunk two or three pints each and were well into their session. I could tell they were in no mood for comedy as I climbed onto the stage and began my act.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Welcome to Easington Working Men’s Club …’ I said as a miner walked through the audience towards the stage. I thought he was going to make an announcement, maybe ask one of the audience to move their car because it was blocking the door.
‘Will you get off?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I want you off. Will you leave the stage?’
‘I have come all the way from Redcar,’ I said. I needed the money.
‘I don’t care where you have come from. I want you off the stage. You’re crap.’
‘I’m not coming off the stage. I’ve been told to do a one-hour slot and I am going to stand here for an hour by hook or by fucking crook.’
‘No, you’re not.’
I turned to the audience: ‘Lads, the concert chairman wants me to come off stage. Silly bastard.’
Some of the miners laughed. Others started to hiss and boo. I didn’t know if the brickbats were directed at me or at the concert chairman. ‘I’m not coming off,’ I said. ‘So you can please your fucking selves.’
I continued telling jokes, running through my usual routine. Most of the audience watched and listened in silence. I could tell what they thinking – ‘This lad has some bottle. Nothing fazes him’ – but there were very few laughs.
Suddenly the side doors opened. I turned around. Silhouetted against the midday sun was the concert chairman standing in the doorway with two huge dogs tugging on leads either side of him. The dogs were growling like they’d had nowt to eat for a week. The chairman walked in with the dogs salivating and gagging to be let loose on me.
‘Are you coming off the stage?’ he said. ‘If you’re not, I’ll set the dogs on you.’
‘All right, all right, mate. I can take a hint,’ I said as the audience started slow-clapping and the first of the strippers came on. Sometimes there was no point in fighting the mood of the crowd.
Working men’s clubs outside the pit villages could be just as bad, particularly on Tyneside or on the Wear. At the Commercial Road Club in Sunderland, a fight broke out in the bar and spilled over into the lounge. By the time I was on stage, the fight had stopped, but the brawlers were in the concert room and giving me trouble. They’d had too much to drink and were heckling me. I was having a go back. Just the usual replies to trouble: ‘You have got the brains of a fucking wasp, mate’ and ‘Don’t kick him up the arse, you’ll give him brain damage.’
I came off, thinking I’d had a fairly decent night and been lucky to survive. The chairman came into the dressing room. ‘Eeh, you told that fucking load of bastards, didn’t you?’ he said.
‘Aye, fucking did. They don’t get far with me.’
Feeling pleased with myself, I carted my gear out of the club to find my van up on bricks. The wheels were gone and the hecklers had got the last laugh. I was furious, but I used it the next day in a gag that used to get a good response. ‘I live on the Commercial Road Estate in Sunderland,’ I said. Most of the audience knew the Commercial Road in Sunderland by its rotten reputation and usually there’d be a ripple of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ around the crowd. ‘The milkman come out of our house the other day,’ I continued, ‘and his donkey was on bricks.’
Towards the end of my stint with George and Mick in Alcock & Brown, I took on more and more work from a local lad called Brian Findlay. Brian was a well-known Teesside show-business agent who had booked The Nuts, Jason and Everard, and Alcock & Brown into hundreds of clubs in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Even by his own admission, Brian was not a good businessman, but he was one of the lads. He was a rascal who liked a drink, a bet on the horses and a good card game. He once went on a trip with a bunch of theatrical agents from the North-East down to London, playing cards all the way to King’s Cross. By the time the train arrived in London, Brian had to lend all of them their spending money because he’d won everything off them.
Brian liked to be around performers. He loved clubland, owned several clubs himself and would buy acts from or trade them with other agents. Most of the acts were dreadful (one was a magician who accidentally set fire to the dove he was hiding in his top hat) but there were so many clubs in those days that anyone could get a gig.
Towards the end of my time with George and Mick in Alcock & Brown, Brian started pushing me to go solo full-time, but he wasn’t particularly ambitious for me. As far as he was concerned, we were just pals and his role in the friendship was to find me work. It was a good working relationship until I needed Brian to sort out some trouble. Brian didn’t have a hurtful bone in his body and he was hopeless at confronting tough club chairmen.
I was about to play the Beechwood and Easterside Social Club in Middlesbrough, which had just built a new concert hall seating seven hundred people. It was Middlesbrough’s largest club and I knew that people had been queuing in the street to see me. The club committee had packed the place to bursting point with punters paying two quid a ticket. The box office takings were £1,400 and I was getting just seventy pounds of that.
‘Brian …’ I said. ‘Isn’t it about time you tapped Beechwood for some more money?’
‘You can’t do that!’ he said. ‘If I ask them for some more money they’ll say no. And they’ll pull all my other acts out.’
So I found myself in the position of backbone to many of Brian’s other acts. Brian would ring up a club and try to book a two-month residency for one of his less successful acts by using me as the carrot. ‘You can’t have Chubby if you don’t take …’ he’d say. It was blackmail, but all agents did it.
Alcock & Brown had just split up when Brian called me with an offer of work in Malta. ‘Roy, the money’s not very good,’ he said, ‘but you get free accommodation, a free car, fifteen pounds spending money and four weeks to lie in the sun.’
I thought about it. I didn’t have much on in Redcar and at least it would be a holiday of sorts. Although I’d docked in several foreign ports while I’d been in the merchant navy, I’d never been on holiday abroad, so I collected the tickets, flew to Valletta and made my own way to the Pescatora restaurant at St Paul’s Bay, my home for the next month. At the restaurant, a lad in the kitchen gave me some keys to a villa and an old Ford Anglia car, which had neither driver’s door nor windscreen wipers. The wipers didn’t concern me – it was August, 114 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and unlikely to rain – but the missing driver’s door was a worry. Then I thought about the twenty-minute journey from the airport to the restaurant. The buildings I’d seen were in a terrible state, crumbling and pock-marked with bullet holes. They looked like they’d seen the end of the Second World War just a week earlier. And the famous green buses that cruised the Maltese streets had no windows, chunks missing from their tyres and passengers hanging on at the back. Dust rose from the roads when cars sped past – something I’d previously seen only in movies. So when I looked at that battered Ford Anglia, a car that would have been scrapped in Britain, I accepted that it was nothing unusual for Malta and that I would have to get used to it.
The lad from the restaurant took me to a house in Bugibba, a nearby resort. From the outside, the house looked like a Mexican hacienda. Inside it was dilapidated and dirty with a load of scruffy furniture stacked up in one room. I turned on a tap. The water came out orange. I opened the fridge and a green lizard crawled out. I looked carefully behind the fridge. There was no back to it. I was bewildered and slightly frightened, but I had no choice but to get on with it.
I drove back to the Pescatora to meet the band at four o’clock. They were called the Maltese Bums and were famous throughout the island. Basso, the bass player, looked like Demis Roussos and had lived in England with an English girl.
‘Are you working for Benny Muscat?’ he said.
‘Benny Muscat? Who’s he?’
>
‘Listen, Roy, I don’t give many people advice but just do as Benny fucking tells you.’
Benny was obviously the boss. He had luxury cars, a beautiful yacht and three or four large restaurants on the island. They were some of the smartest buildings in Malta and Benny, when I met him, was one of the smartest men. He wore dark glasses and a sharp suit. All the men who surrounded him were dressed similarly, but their suits were made from slightly cheaper fabrics and cut less generously.
So I just went along with it. Every evening, I did a forty-five-minute spot at the Pescatora, then jumped in my Ford Anglia and drove to Mosta to do another forty-five minutes of comedy at The Whisper, another of Benny’s restaurants, opposite a church. One of the chefs would feed me at the end of my second spot, then I had the next day off until about eight p.m., when I had to report to the Pescatora.
After a few days, I got to know the bands at the two restaurants. They were both fantastic. Entirely self-taught, none of the musicians could read a note, but they were instinctive players and extremely good. I thought they were so accomplished because they had nowt else to do but practise. Then I got speaking to Paul, the drummer at The Whisper.
‘When you finish here,’ I said, ‘what do you do then?’
‘I play until twelve o’clock, then go home, get changed and go out with my father and brother fishing.’
Paul would fish from midnight until five or six o’clock in the morning. Then he’d go home and sleep until midday. In the afternoon, he worked in an office until six o’clock when he went home, got changed and ran to The Whisper in time for the band to start at eight o’clock. These three jobs netted him around fifty quid a week – about half what I would make on a good night at home.
I spent the first few days in Malta rehearsing with the band. I’d written a song called ‘Fat and Tall’ and I wanted the band to accompany me while I played the piano and sang. I was due to start playing at Benny’s restaurants on my fourth day in Malta. We rehearsed in the morning and then I headed for the beach, buying a loaf of bread, a couple of tins of beans, some cakes and biscuits and some cans of drink on the way. It was ridiculously cheap.
The beach at St Paul’s Bay was deserted and I lay in the sun for a couple of hours, thinking that this was the life. It didn’t get much better than lying in the sun all day before performing a couple of gigs every evening with accommodation, food and spending money thrown in. I got back to the shabby house and wanted to take a shower, but the waterworks in Malta left so much to be desired that I gave it a miss.
Shortly after six o’clock I got ready for work. It was so hot, I’d been walking around the house in my underpants – and then I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I was red from head to toe. It was no wonder my skin had been stinging so badly. I’d burnt my face, neck, chest, back and the tops of my legs.
I didn’t know how I was going to work looking like that, so I dabbed after-sun cream all over myself with a piece of cotton wool. I jumped in the car and raced to the Pescatora, where I ran on stage looking like a ripe strawberry with legs. At the end of my act, I took off my shirt. The skin on my back came away with it. I put on a clean shirt. It was immediately soaked with blood.
‘I think you should go to hospital, Roy,’ Basso said.
‘I’ve got another fucking show to do and you’ve just told me that when Benny summons you, you fucking run.’
I raced to The Whisper and put on yet another shirt. The same thing happened – it was covered with bloodstains within minutes, so I walked on sideways, like a crab, so the audience wouldn’t see the back of my shirt. I spent my entire act standing still, making sure that only the band could see the agony I was going through.
The next morning, Basso’s sister picked me up and took me to Valletta hospital. I’d been there once before, when I was in the merchant navy and had contracted malaria. I was given a ticket and told to wait in a corridor. Hours later and sweating with the pain of my burns, I was called into a room where a bloke in a white coat was standing with a clipboard.
‘Are you English?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’m badly burned.’
‘Oh, you’ve been a silly lad, haven’t you.’
Throughout the time the doctor treated me, a plumber was at work in the room, sawing a pipe a couple of feet away from the treatment table. There was dust everywhere, but they didn’t seem to care.
I recovered from the burns over the next few days and had been in Malta for more than a week when I started to run out of the pocket money I’d brought with me. I needed the fifteen quid a week I’d been promised, so I went to the manageress of the Pescatora.
‘I’ve been here ten days and I haven’t been paid yet,’ I said.
‘You want to get paid?’
‘Yes, I’m supposed to get fifteen pounds pocket money.’
‘Oh, forget that,’ she said. ‘You just go in the kitchen and help yourself.’
‘But I can’t put food from the kitchen in the car.’
‘You don’t need petrol. You go to Benny’s garage.’ She gave me the address of a garage and that was the end of my quest for payment. I never saw a penny of the fee I’d been promised and I wouldn’t ever have spoken to Benny had I not made a massive faux pas.
I used to do a routine in which I sat in a cot dressed as a baby, sucking a massive dummy and wearing a giant nappy. On my belly, which hung over my nappy, I wrote ‘Empty’ with a felt-tip pen. The act wasn’t particularly sophisticated – I’d walk around the stage, making baby noises – but I knew I had it down to a fine art and that it hit a nerve because the audience would cry tears of laughter.
I unveiled my baby act on my first Saturday night at the Pescatora. On every other night, the crowd was predominantly British tourists, but Saturday was the big Maltese night out. There were a few laughs, but they soon gave way to a deadly silence.
‘Benny wants to speak to you,’ Basso hissed from behind his bass guitar as I headed off stage.
‘Oh right, I’ll ask him for my fifteen fucking quid.’
Benny was standing in the shadows backstage.
‘Roy,’ he said in a thick accent. ‘I watch your act. Is very funny but I am asking you to take out the routine with the baby.’
‘Why?’
‘Is insult to Maltese people to show skin. I have lots of complaints about it.’
‘Oh …’
‘Very funny – I understand English ways. But you have to understand Maltese ways and we don’t allow skin, especially in view of public …’
That was all he said to me, but he gave the band a right rollicking. They were told they should have told me, but it just hadn’t dawned on any of them to say I could do the baby act any time but Saturday night.
A week after I arrived back in Redcar from Malta, Brian booked me into Blackhall Colliery Working Men’s Club. I was standing at the bar when one of the stewards came up to me.
‘Now then’, he said.
‘OK?’ I replied.
‘No, I am not OK. You spoilt my holiday.’
‘I spoilt your holiday?’
‘Yeah. I took my wife and kids to Malta for a holiday. On the second night we went out to this restaurant and you walked on stage. And you took the piss out of the North-East.’
‘I am a comedian. That’s what I do.’
‘But you said there was that much muck and filth and dust and coal and slag and shit in Teesside, you could see a red light in the distance and it got clearer and clearer. And then you realised it was the end of your cigarette.’
‘Yeah. It’s a joke.’
‘Not to me it isn’t. Not to me – I protect the North-East.’ And he droned on interminably about the North-East until I’d had enough and interrupted him.
‘I spoilt your holiday?’ I said. ‘You went with Thomas Cook or some other travel company for a fortnight’s holiday in Malta that cost you an arm and a leg and I spoilt it because I cracked jokes
about the North-East?’
‘Aye. That’s right.’
‘As far as I am concerned, you’ve the brains of a fucking thalidomide fucking wasp with piles and you want putting down.’ It was an insult I used a lot in those days. Most of the time, it made whoever I directed it at laugh. But this time it didn’t work. As I walked away, the steward hit me with a bicycle chain that he must have kept behind the bar.
I went mad. I jumped on him. I thumped him. I kicked him. I punched him. I hit him as hard as I could. He tried to fight back, but we were pulled apart by a couple of bouncers. ‘I will kill you,’ I shouted. ‘You fucking twat.’
I walked out and got in my van and left. I phoned Brian the next morning.
‘Boy, is it great to be back home,’ I said. ‘Don’t you ever book me into Blackhall Colliery again. I’m never going back there.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Brian said. ‘I just had a call from Middlesbrough TUC Club. They want you.’
‘But I’ve just done it, Brian,’ I said, ‘just before I went to Malta. I’ll die on my arse, man. The same lads get in there all the time, the same football team, the same hairy-arsed scaffolders and welders. They’ll know my act.’
‘Well, they’re asking for you back. The comic hasn’t turned up and there’s a couple of strippers and the Great Enrico. They want you to fill in for the comic and it’s an extra fiver for you.’
We agreed to meet at the venue the next night. I got in my van and headed down to the TUC club on Longlands Road in Middlesbrough. I’d often joked about what TUC stood for – Ten Useless Cunts on the committee. When I arrived, Brian was waiting. The chairman told me the running order.
‘We’re putting the Great Enrico on first, then the strippers, then you’re doing your spot, then the strippers again, then Enrico, then you on last.’
As I sat in my dressing room, trying to think of different gags and openers that the crowd wouldn’t have heard the last time I played the TUC club, I didn’t give the Great Enrico much thought. I’d not heard of him before and I assumed he’d be a tenor.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 18