Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  Shortly before the show was due to start, a huge Scottish bloke with tattoos and curly hair walked in.

  ‘Where’s that fucking agent?’ he said in a thick Scottish accent.

  ‘This is “that fucking agent”,’ I said, pointing at Brian. ‘He’s called Brian and he bought you. He’s booked you off another agency.’

  Enrico gave Brian a cursory nod, then busied himself getting his costume and props ready. While Enrico was rooting around in his bag, the club chairman came in looking for Enrico’s sheet music to give to the band. ‘Have you got your dots?’ he said.

  ‘I only need music to play me on and off,’ Enrico said. ‘I am a magic act.’

  The chairman walked out, leaving Brian and me looking at each other with raised eyebrows. It seemed a bit odd, a big lad like Enrico being a magic act, but I’d seen stranger things in clubland. Fortunately, Enrico soon relaxed and I found he wasn’t quite so much the aggressive Scotsman that he’d first seemed. We cracked open a couple of cans of beer, I sat down on a tall basket that Enrico had brought into the dressing room and we chatted a bit until he was called on stage.

  Tom on the organ and Bill on the drums played a fanfare as the concert chairman stepped up to the microphone. ‘Good evening, gentlemen …’ he said. Nobody paid a blind bit of notice. They continued drinking and talking as Enrico walked on stage.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My name is Enrico. It’s nice to be here in the TUC Club in Middlesbrough. Has anyone got an apple?’

  Silence.

  ‘I said: has anyone got an apple?’

  Again, silence. Enrico was staring so hard at a bloke in the audience that I twigged that he must have planted an apple with him earlier.

  ‘Anyone got an apple?’ Enrico asked, quite clearly directing his question solely at the one bloke in the audience.

  ‘I’ve eaten it,’ the bloke said.

  There were a few awkward giggles and all the lads who’d been ignoring Enrico suddenly took an interest.

  ‘You cunt, you’ve ate my fiver!’ Enrico said. ‘There was a fiver in that apple.’

  That was it. The club erupted with laughter.

  ‘Has anyone got a tomato?’ Enrico said.

  ‘You know fucking well we haven’t,’ another bloke shouted out. ‘If we had, you’d have got it in the face five minutes ago!’

  Enrico was getting all the laughs, but I wasn’t sure if they were laughing at him or with him.

  ‘I daren’t ask if anybody’s got my fucking orange,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, it’s here,’ someone shouted. And an orange flew through the air, hitting Enrico on the head. He was furious. I could see the steam rising inside him as he went through the rest of his act, trying to salvage his routine with some stupid one-liners when the audience was still laughing about the apple and the tomato. Towards the end, he dipped a torch in a wineglass containing some petrol and lit it. I’d seen strippers do a similar thing, running flaming torches over their bodies, pretending to burn themselves. But the Great Enrico was taking it a stage further. I could smell scorching. He was actually burning himself. Smoke was coming off his arm. This Scot was as hard as nails and he was out to prove it.

  A balcony ran around the top of the TUC’s concert hall. Standing on the balcony was a big gang of lads who looked like they were out for trouble. One of them shouted down to Enrico.

  ‘Oi! Jock!’ he yelled. I saw Enrico wince at being called Jock. ‘Give us a light!’

  Holding the wineglass of petrol in his hand, Enrico ambled over to the side of the stage near where the lad was standing on the balcony. He took a swig of the petrol and blew a long, roaring flame towards the balcony.

  The head of the bloke on the balcony looked like it was on fire. When the smoke cleared, he was standing absolutely still, his eyes the only white patches in his sooty black face. He looked like Al Jolson.

  Enrico finished his act and walked off stage to a few claps, leaving me watching in the wings, wondering how I was going to top his act. It had been brilliant. If you could have bottled that routine, you would have made a fortune.

  The strippers came on and I went back to the dressing room. Midway through me telling Enrico what a wonderful act he had, there was a bang on the door. I opened it to find the lad from the balcony standing there, smoke still rising off his hair.

  ‘I want a word with that cunt,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Well, he’s just getting changed.’

  ‘I want a word with him now.’

  ‘Could you just hang on a minute, he’s just putting his clothes on.’

  Another five lads were standing behind the burnt lad. He must have talked them into giving Enrico a battering. I shut the door. ‘You’d better get out now,’ I said to Enrico. ‘There’s six big lads out there with that guy with the flame.’

  ‘Aye, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, if I was you I’d go through that door now,’ I said, pointing at the rear exit. ‘Go through that door and down them stairs, get in your car and I’ll get Brian to send you your money.’

  ‘I’m not frightened.’

  ‘Look, these lads are fucking hard cases. They look like killers to me. So why don’t you just …’

  ‘No. It’s all right.’

  The lads waiting outside the dressing room started banging hard on the door.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted, opening the door. ‘Stop fucking banging on the door.’

  ‘I want to see that cunt.’

  ‘I know you do. Let him get fucking changed.’

  Behind me I heard Enrico say quite clearly and slowly: ‘Let them in.’

  ‘Go on!’ said the lad with the smoking hair. ‘Let us in!’

  ‘I know what he said,’ I said. ‘But look, I don’t want any trouble. If you’re going to cause trouble, the club will get the police and I’m in the middle of this.’

  ‘We don’t want any trouble with you, Chubby,’ the lad said. ‘I just want that twat.’

  ‘It was just a bit of fun that went wrong. Enrico didn’t mean to burn you – but you do look like Sammy Davis Junior.’

  The lad’s mates started giggling while the burnt lad twitched like Desperate Dan.

  ‘Let them in,’ Enrico said behind me.

  So I opened the door fully. When I turned around, Enrico was standing bare-chested with a twenty-five-foot python wrapped around his neck, its head gripped in his hand.

  ‘I want a word with you,’ the burnt lad said.

  ‘Aye? What you want?’

  ‘Er …’ the burnt lad said, his voice suddenly reedy and nervous. ‘Is … is … that a real snake?’ In an instant he’d gone from threatening to kill Enrico to outright surrender.

  ‘Aye,’ Enrico said.

  ‘A real fucking snake?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘What’s it doing here?’ gulped the burnt lad.

  ‘It’s part of my act. Do you want to stroke it?’

  ‘No, no, no, you’re all right, mate. No, I’m all right, thanks.’ Walking towards the door, the burnt lad stopped just before leaving the dressing room and pointed at his face. ‘And by the way, that’s not fucking funny.’

  As soon as the burnt lad had left the room, I asked Enrico: ‘Where was that snake?’

  ‘It was in the basket.’

  ‘You cunt, I’ve been sat on that fucking basket for the last twenty minutes. You could have told me there was a fucking snake in it!’

  ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I’m going in the other dressing room.’

  After a few more months playing the North-East clubs I was back in Malta. I wanted to show Beryl, who I was living with at the time, the Pescatora and the other restaurants in which I had worked. About a dozen of us went in a group, including Marty Miller, who’d lent me the money for my first drum kit, his wife Sue, a Middlesbrough taxi driver called George and his wife Margaret. Also with us was a theatrical agent called Norma
n Wales, who smoked a pipe and worked for Brian Findlay, and Norman’s wife Louvane. Norman made us all laugh when he fell asleep on a deckchair one afternoon while the rest of us were swimming. He woke up after an hour to find that he’d fallen asleep with his hand on his chest, leaving a perfect white silhouette of his hand on his brown torso. His wife Lou was a lovely, clever woman who wore glasses and was a lot of fun.

  Beryl and I spent many days with Norman and Lou, going to see the sights or swimming in the sea. Near the end of the fortnight’s holiday we decided to take the ferry to Gozo, a neighbouring island where the locals made beautiful lace cloths and handkerchiefs that we thought we’d buy as presents for friends and family at home. But storm clouds were gathering by the time we got to the ferry port and the sailings were cancelled for that day.

  While we were driving back to the hotel, the car that Beryl and I had hired broke down. Beryl got into a car with Marty and Sue and I squeezed in with Norman, Lou, George and Margaret.

  Not far from the hotel, as we were coming down a mountainside near Rabat, the heavens opened. Over the next two hours, more than eighteen inches of rain fell on an island that usually got only twenty-four inches in a year. It rained so hard that we couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. The car had no windscreen wipers, so George pulled over to wait until the downpour subsided.

  ‘I wish I was sat here in my swimming trunks,’ I joked – but there wasn’t time to laugh as the car was suddenly jolted upwards. The car moved sideways, then it rocked from side to side and started floating down the street.

  A reservoir above Rabat had burst and millions of gallons of water were coming down the side of the mountain. Built on solid rock and with little vegetation, Malta had few fields or flood plains to soak up the water, which came roaring down the hillside. Sweeping up everything in its path, a wall of water lifted our car twenty feet on the swell. We all panicked. With water coming through the dashboard and the air vents, under the doors and around the windows, we had seconds to make a decision. Pressing my feet against the passenger door, I shouted to the others in the car as the car hit the side of a bank and flipped over.

  ‘If we don’t get out of the car, we’re going to drown inside it!’ I yelled as I pushed the door open and the water surged into the car. Grabbing Louvane by her anorak and Margaret by her arm, I pushed us all out of the door. We were floating in deep water gushing down the road in a gully between the mountainside and a high wall. The girls were screaming and other cars were swirling past us. A school bus and a van with some kids screeching inside it floated past, but there was nothing we could do. It was like something from a horror movie.

  As the water swept down the road I kept hold of Margaret and Lou, my fingers digging into their arms. The water hit us again and again, like a wave crashing against rocks on a beach, as I pushed the girls towards some trees along the side of a boulevard.

  ‘Get hold of a tree,’ I yelled. ‘Get hold of a tree!’

  I grabbed a palm tree at the side of the road and held on for my life. I looked round. George had grasped a tree and was climbing up a bank, pulling Margaret and Norman behind him. They were out of the water and were safe. Next to them Louvane was clinging to another tree, screaming as the water washed around her.

  ‘My handbag!’ she bawled. ‘My purse! My passport!’

  ‘Fuck your purse and your handbag!’ I yelled. ‘Keep hold of the tree!’

  Lou let go of the tree, but I managed to grab her. ‘Keep hold of me!’ I screamed as I dragged the two of us towards another tree that had fallen over and lodged against the bank, its branches splayed all around it. ‘Grab hold of the branches!’ I yelled.

  I looked at Lou. She had lost her glasses.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I shouted.

  ‘I’m frightened, Roy. I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Just hold on to the tree! Hold on to the tree!’

  I let go of the tree to push around it so that I could pull Lou up the bank. But when I got round to the far side of the tree, Lou was gone.

  ‘Where’s Lou?’ Norman shouted from the bank.

  I didn’t know what to say. ‘She’s on the other side, Norman,’ I lied. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t know where she was. As I said it, I looked down the road and saw a massive wave hit the bank, sweeping everything in its path over the mountainside. I knew then that none of us would ever see Lou again.

  I climbed up on to a wall. A cornfield waist-deep in water was on the other side, but at least the water there was still. I waded through it to a farmhouse where a farmer was stranded at an upstairs window, waving and shouting in Maltese. Turning back towards the bank, I saw Norman running along the top searching for Lou as a helicopter plucked Margaret and George off the bank. I got to the farmhouse and the farmer pulled me up to his first-floor window.

  ‘English! English!’ I said.

  ‘Very, very bad storm,’ the farmer said. ‘You safe now.’

  ‘My friend’s car has gone.’

  ‘Is OK. They take them Mosta. You go Mosta. We wait here and they take you Mosta.’

  We sat on the windowsill of the farmhouse, waiting to be rescued, me half naked. The force of the water had washed off my shoes, socks, trousers and top. All I had on was my underpants. The farmer wrapped a potato sack around me, which immediately brought me out in spots, but at least I was warm and dry.

  A large army truck pulled up and took us to the police station at Mosta, where I was left standing in a waiting room for hours. Then a policeman walked in with Norman.

  ‘Where is she?’ Norman said immediately.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I am sorry, Norman.’

  Norman said nothing. He just stared blankly at me.

  ‘I tell you where she’ll be now,’ I said. ‘She’ll be in a farmhouse or somebody will have taken her in and she’ll be sat there wondering about you.’ But as I said it, I was convinced that Lou was not with us any more.

  ‘What if she has drowned, what if …’ Norman started. And then he broke down in tears.

  I wanted to say the right things, but it was difficult in front of a man as distraught as Norman. I put my arms around him. ‘You are looking at the black side, Norman,’ I said. ‘Let’s not think the worst until we know for sure what has happened to Lou.’

  We gave the police all our details, then they dropped us back at the hotel. When I walked in, Beryl burst into tears. She had been told that we were probably all dead. (A premature report even made the local paper in Middlesbrough. ‘Chubby Brown missing on holiday’, the headline said.) Beryl and the others had made it back to the hotel without mishap. They’d spent the storm in the hotel’s lounge, watching the water wash half the hotel’s grounds and its swimming pool down the hill. There were uprooted trees and plants everywhere.

  At least twenty people died that day. A Land Rover with four people in it had been swept off a viaduct. A woman had drowned in her wine cellar. But in those days most of Malta looked like it had just been through a disaster. The next day, much of the island looked as if nothing had happened. It was hard to tell the difference.

  We all took taxis out to the bottom of the viaduct where Lou had disappeared. Word had got around the resorts that we were looking for an Englishwoman and more than two hundred English tourists turned up to help search for her. One of them came over to me.

  ‘Hiya,’ he said. ‘Chubby, isn’t it?’ He was a small guy. With dark curly hair, a moustache and a suntan he looked a bit Greek.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘George Forster. Fairworld Promotions,’ he said, offering his hand.

  I knew who George was through reputation, but otherwise he was a stranger to me.

  ‘Bit of a sad day,’ he said.

  ‘Did you know Lou and her husband?’

  ‘Well, I knew Norman,’ George said. ‘What with buying and selling acts, I speak to Norman all the time on the phone, but I didn’t know his wife. It’s a very sad affair.’


  We got on with searching for Lou. It was a beautiful day, the sky blue, the air warm and soft, but no birds were singing. It was eerily quiet. The police gave us long sticks to poke through the thick mud left on the road. And as we probed with our sticks, I didn’t know what to say to Norman. I was sure that Lou was dead, but I didn’t want to find a body.

  Two days later, Lou still not found, we were due to fly home. Norman decided to stay on until he’d located Lou. The rest of us flew back in silence, all shocked by the tragic events.

  Norman called the next day. Lou had been found two and a half miles out to sea. Two fishermen had netted her body in the bay. The police said she’d been pulled under the surface of the water, gone under a bridge and into the drains. She was unrecognisable. Norman had identified Lou by her wedding ring.

  Norman flew back and was met at the airport by his two sons. I went round to the house. As I walked up the path to the door, I heard one of the boys howling. ‘My mother! My mother!’ he screamed. Lou had died on exactly the same date as her mother, and they’d both been thirty-nine when they went.

  ‘They want seven hundred pounds for us to bring my mam’s body back,’ one of the sons said to me. I knew Norman didn’t have it. He was a junior insurance agent who lived hand to mouth and who put in extra hours with Brian Findlay to earn enough money to put tobacco in his pipe. Other than that, he didn’t have a penny to scratch his arse.

  I made a call to Brian. ‘Why don’t you put on a special Chubby Brown show at one of the biggest clubs and we’ll give all the money to Norman?’ I said. ‘That should be enough to bring Lou’s body back and pay for a funeral.’

  I called the show Chubby’s Fresh Brown Eggs – I don’t know why – and pulled together the best North-East musicians I knew. Paul Smith on drums, Tubby Ian on bass and Paul Flush on piano. I also roped in Les Desouza and Art McArthur, two great singers for a show that ran from eight o’clock until midnight with an hour’s comedy from me. We sold out and, with the tickets at two pounds each, we raised enough money for Norman to bring Lou’s body back.