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

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s a tough girl, you know.’

  ‘I know. She comes from Grangetown. The same place as me. She went to school with me. I know she’s a tough girl.’

  I asked the nurse if she had any favourite tales about Sandra. ‘The one we all laugh about,’ she said, ‘is the time we rang her at home one night when we were having trouble with a regular patient who came in all the time on drugs. “Sandra, Tommy’s on the windowsill and he won’t come in,” we said. “He’s going to jump.”

  ‘About twenty minutes later Sandra walked into the ward. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said to Tommy. “I’m going to jump,” he said. “Well, jump, then – and shut the window.”’

  ‘You can’t treat people like that,’ I said.

  ‘Sandra did,’ the nurse said. ‘And he soon came back inside.’

  The crew on the QE2 knew we were newly-weds and gave us free chocolates and as much champagne as we could drink. We hadn’t finished unpacking our cases when there was a knock on our cabin door. It was the boatswain. ‘You’re Chubby Brown, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do a show for us, would you – in the Boatswain’s Nest? It’s our bar down near the engine room where all the crew drink.’

  Sandra agreed to let me go. It was a tiny place and when I arrived it was heaving with sailors and crew. ‘Where am I gonna stand?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got a barrel in the corner,’ the boatswain said. ‘Will you stand on a barrel?’

  Compared to playing gigs from the tops of crates or standing on sticky clubroom floors, a barrel was the Palladium. ‘Yeah, all right then,’ I said.

  I stood on the barrel for forty minutes without a microphone, talking to the crew, cracking gags about the ship, the sea and the Navy. It was absolutely fabulous. One of my best gigs. I was on a high after the wedding, I was thrilled to be on the QE2 and the crew were my kind of lads.

  At half past five on the fifth morning, we passed the Statue of Liberty as we sailed into New York harbour. The whole ship was up to see it, Sandra in her nightie and me in my pyjamas under our overcoats because we’d been told we would arrive at seven o’clock and had to race onto the deck.

  We stayed in a hotel near Grand Central Station. I couldn’t get over the size of the jacuzzi and the forty channels on the television. We took in some shows on Broadway, went up the Empire State Building and shopped at Macy’s and the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, where you could pay two hundred dollars for a tie and a flunky asked for five dollars if he carried your coffee to your table. I told him if he wanted a tip, Big Bertha in the 3.30 at Kempton Park was worth a punt.

  It was a fantastic holiday. When we got on Concorde, one of the stewardesses recognised me. ‘The pilots noticed you when you got on,’ she said. ‘Would you like to go up front?’ Sat on a little red jump seat, headphones on, I chatted with the captain through the microphone while Concorde flew twice as fast as sound over the Atlantic. Up above, the sky was inky black. Down below, the water was dark blue, speckled with the white dots of thousands of icebergs. I felt a very long way from Grangetown.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  HOME AND AWAY

  SATURDAY NIGHT IN Blackpool and every seat in the theatre is taken, all of them Chubby fans eager to see my first night back after cancer. Standing in the wings, I run through the material I rehearsed at home and peer at the audience. I know what they’re whispering – ‘Do you think he’ll do it, do you think he’ll …’ – and I think: I can do this. I’m ready.

  The music starts, I dance on stage, shuffle over to the microphone stand, open my mouth and …

  My voice had still been hoarse a month earlier when I’d gone into my garage, locked both doors, taken a deep breath and started talking. Walking up and down, I ran through all the material I’d written in the seven months since I’d last faced an audience, just to see if I could remember it.

  I’d been writing all the time I’d been convalescing. It felt good to have built up all that material, but when you write ‘fuck’ on a piece of paper it’s not as funny as when you say it in front of 1,500 people. And by the time I was ready to go back on the road, the news had changed. Things that had happened to Madonna, Sting and Elton John were yesterday’s news and I had to start afresh. I looked through my back catalogue of gags for the jokes that had always got a laugh. After all, the first night’s important.

  … And it all goes brilliantly until twenty-five minutes into the show my throat switches off, just like a candle being blown out. One moment it’s there; the next moment, nothing. After thirty minutes on stage there’s only one thing for me to say.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I whisper. ‘As you can see, I’ve got a problem.’

  Walking off to a standing ovation, I can’t meet anyone’s eyes as I come off stage. I keep my head down and make straight for my dressing room. The door shut and locked behind me, I burst into tears and think the unthinkable: oh fucking hell, I am finished.

  Afterwards, everyone says the same thing – don’t worry about it; at least you got through half an hour – but their words sound hollow and false. I thought I could do it. My mind had been willing, it was just that my throat wouldn’t play along. And then I pull myself together. Don’t be a defeatist, you arsehole, I tell myself. Get up and get on with it.

  There’s no speaking to me after that. I don’t want to talk to anyone. All week I steam my throat and do my exercises. I phone Jane Deakin. ‘I told you it would be difficult,’ she says. ‘But hey, congratulations. Half an hour is a good start. It will only get stronger.

  ‘When we started,’ Jane says, ‘I told you there was no guarantee that your voice would come back. But you’ve done much better than I expected and from here on, it’s all up to you.’

  George phones, wanting to know if I still want to play the Blackpool gig booked for next Saturday. ‘Are you sure you can do it?’ he says. ‘Because I can’t ask people for seventeen quid a ticket if you’re not gonna get through it.’ He’s right to be worried – if the press hears of it, they’ll accuse us of conning my audience – but I know that George is more worried about himself than about me. He wants to get in his last couple of bob before he retires.

  The next Saturday, I return to Blackpool. I play an hour. A full fucking hour. It’s fantastic and the crowd is great. I still can’t sing, so the audience gets a bumper show of gags, more in an hour than I’ve told in that time for years.

  That night I go back to the hotel with the management, the crew and some friends and get completely and utterly legless. The champagne is out and everyone is celebrating, singing ‘Welcome back, welcome back’ until their voices are hoarse.

  ‘Let’s do two nights a week,’ I tell George. Then we increase it to three nights a week and I go to see Jane Deakin and Dr Martin.

  ‘You’re doing too much,’ Dr Martin says.

  ‘Two nights is sufficient,’ Jane says.

  Feeling I could do more than two, I nevertheless stick to their advice. I tell George not to exceed two bookings a week.

  ‘No problem,’ he says. ‘But is two enough?’

  Six months later, I’m back up to three nights a week.

  Of the eight years that Sandra and I were married, seven years and ten months were pure purgatory. I put up with it because I was away working most of the time and because I thought better the devil you know, but to this day I really don’t know how I didn’t lose my mind.

  Within a month of returning home from our New York honeymoon, all the warnings I’d had about Sandra started to come true. She turned what should have been the happiest years of my life into a misery. I could tell some horror stories, but the last thing I want to do is relive the intimate details of that marriage, the worst mistake I ever made.

  I’ve never been able to work out why I stayed with Sandra for so long when it was obvious to everyone around us that our relationship was rotten to the core. Someone
once suggested that my mother’s desertion of me when I was a kid left me unable to form intimate relationships with women. By 1990 my mother was in a nursing home, still banging on about my father. He was a bastard, he was a pig, he was a bully, he was an alcoholic, he was … she always had sommat to say about him and she never forgave him for whatever it was that pulled them apart. Although she wouldn’t tell me, I was starting to get an insight into what it might have been. Looking out of a window at a bit of parkland one day, Mam snorted and pointed at two dogs. ‘Look at that there,’ she said with disgust.

  I looked closer. The dogs were having it away. ‘You shouldn’t be looking at things like that, Mother,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody homosexuals.’

  ‘You’ve got good eyesight, haven’t you?’ I said. The dogs were about two hundred yards away.

  ‘That’s because they’re just like your father.’

  ‘Now hang on, Mother, I’m getting a little bit sick of this now. Every day you have a go, but my father was not a homosexual. Of all the things he was, he was not a poofter.’

  ‘Yeah, but he was a dirty dog.’

  ‘C’mon, Mother, you must have loved my father at some time.’

  ‘He threw our love away,’ she said. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Your dad would get into bed and I would go to cuddle him and he’d say get off and push me to one side.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I felt unwanted,’ said Mam.

  It was the only time Mam mentioned anything to do with her break-up from Dad and I was left wondering whether maybe my auld fella had been seeing a barmaid at the club or whether it was something else. I never found out and my mam wasn’t one for revealing much. She’d been in the nursing home about six months when she needed to go to hospital, so I offered to pick her up after she’d been seen by the doctor. When I arrived she was sitting on a bed, waiting for me and bossing the nurses around. I carried her bags to my car, Mam stopping nurses she knew to show me off to them. ‘He’s that comedian, you know,’ she said as if I wasn’t there. ‘That Chubby Brown.’

  Driving in the car towards Redcar, I asked her how she felt.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Lovely, but I can’t wait to get back to my own bed. I’m more comfortable in it.’

  ‘Well, you know we love you,’ I said. ‘Me and Barbara.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know that and I know you’d do owt for me and I love you too. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do, Mother.’

  ‘I do. I love you and our Barbara and I miss you terribly …’

  Mam had never talked like that before. It was the first time I’d heard her say that she loved me or my sister.

  I dropped Mam off at the nursing home at four o’clock. At half past six, I was sitting in my house when the phone rang. ‘Is that you, Roy?’ a woman’s voice said. I could hear someone crying hysterically in the background.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s the matron, Roy. I’ve got some terrible news for you. Your mother passed away at six o’clock this evening. Your sister’s here. I think you should come down.’

  I was stunned. I went down to the nursing home. My sister was in a terrible state. I comforted her. I didn’t know what to say. For once, I was lost for words. We took Mam to the morgue, then I went home, opened a bottle of whisky and sat thinking about all the things I wished I’d said to Mam before it was too late and why my life with Sandra had become such a mess.

  Maybe I had hung on to Sandra because when we were teenagers she’d been the first woman I’d got close to after my mother left home. Maybe that’s why I was still putting up with Sandra and her criticisms of George, who was her public enemy number two after me.

  George had helped me rise from the relative obscurity of the clubs to national notoriety and selling out theatres from Penzance to Aberdeen. It’s something for which I’ll always be thankful. But when I told Sandra that George was taking thirty per cent of my theatre income, she was outraged.

  I knew that for George I was the goose that laid the golden eggs, but I also knew that George was the farmer without whom that goose wouldn’t prosper. Whenever someone criticised George, I said exactly what I’d always said: ‘You don’t know George like I do’ and ‘I’d rather have him working for me than against me.’

  With such a miserable home life, I’d come to rely heavily on George’s friendship and support. Thanks to his guidance, I’d become a household name, selling out every theatre months in advance. At last I was getting the recognition that I’d always wanted. I was spotting my name all over the place. Viz started featuring a comic strip called Chubby the Foul-Mouthed Fish for which I’d been the inspiration. I was reading the New Musical Express when I saw that one famous guitar hero cited me as the best medicine for a guitarist who had become very big for his boots after becoming a star. ‘What he wants to do is lock himself in a room with a Chubby Brown tape for half an hour and get back in touch with reality,’ the guitar hero said.

  A while later, I went to a Simply Red concert. Standing about twenty yards from the front with all the young girls dancing around me, I was approached by a bouncer. ‘Are you Chubby Brown?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Mick wants a word.’

  ‘Mick who?’

  ‘Mick Hucknall.’

  ‘He wants to speak to me?’

  ‘Yeah, he spotted you.’

  ‘Ah, fuck off!’

  ‘No, really. He did.’

  After the show I went backstage. Mick Hucknall came over with a glass of champagne. ‘I’m a big fan,’ he said. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  And while trying to pass time on an afternoon before a gig, I picked up a book called Vile Filth in a bookshop. It had sections on the most vile kings, politicians and celebrities. One section was headed ‘comedians’, so I immediately turned to it. ‘Britain’s most vile comedian is Roy Chubby Brown,’ it said at the top of a whole page about my act. When I saw that, I thought: Wow! I’ve made it at last.

  It was a real buzz to sell out a theatre and then, on the night, to see touts selling ten-quid tickets for fifty pounds. Although I’d get my bouncers to move the touts on, I was fascinated, finding it hard to believe that I was responsible for that. Things were going so well for me from the late 1980s to the late 1990s that at times it seemed like it was happening to someone else. I’d stand on stage, watching the entire audience rocking in their seats, whole blocks of people rolling forwards as they laughed, and I’d wonder what the hell they were laughing at. I would have told the joke sixty times before and could no longer hear the humour in it. Here we go again, I’d think to myself as I started telling the joke once more. However, for the audience it was the first time they’d heard it and as long as I didn’t fluff it and as long as I got the timing right, they’d all laugh so precisely on cue that it was like pushing a button. It made me feel like God.

  I had watched my ticket prices rise like a meteor from a quid to two pounds to two pounds fifty to a fiver to ten quid and on up to seventeen or eighteen pounds. And the higher the ticket price, the more control I had over the audience. If I was persistently heckled or if the audience was really rowdy I’d simply walk off stage, go to my dressing room, sit down and have a cup of tea. I’d give them ten minutes, then I’d walk back on stage and it would be like a different audience. They calmed down simply because they were worried that I wouldn’t come back on stage and they had paid good money for a ticket. It always worked.

  I produced some of the best material of my career in that golden era. After years of fighting to be heard in clubs, at last the audiences were listening attentively, hanging on every word. I was working seven nights a week and squeezing in two Saturday shows during three-month summer seasons in Blackpool. When I wasn’t on stage, I was working on the material. And like a body that needs exercise to stay fit, I was writing better gags simply because I was working my
comedy muscle all the time.

  The demand for new material stepped up a gear in 1990, when George suggested that we should make a video. For many years I’d produced audio-cassette tapes and records of my performances that I’d sold after shows. Television executives had picked up on my nationwide popularity and invited me onto late-night shows with the proviso that I tamed my act for a television audience. I appeared on The Danny Baker Show, which I enjoyed because Danny Baker had the guts to bring on guests that other shows wouldn’t touch with a bargepole and because he was a very nice fella.

  I appeared with Barbara Windsor (who said she was a big fan – ‘I love him! I love him!’ she kept on saying) on The Word, a late-night cult programme for teenagers and twenty-year-olds. They interviewed me in Tenerife, asking me about political correctness while I lay beside a pool at the Palace Hotel.

  But mostly I turned down any television offers, partly because I didn’t really enjoy it but mainly because I was reluctant to give away some of my best material for a pittance. With fans clamouring to see me on television, the obvious answer was a video of a stage performance. The first in what would become an annual production was From Inside the Helmet. ‘The BBC is here tonight,’ I told the fans, pointing at the cameras around the stage. ‘This is Bill, that’s Bob and Colin’s at the back.’

  Filmed live in Blackpool, it remains one of my favourite videos. With no fancy camera angles, it’s raw and pure. Just me and a camera. My voice was in good shape and the material had been extensively tried and tested over the previous three or four years, so it was very strong. It was a solid sixty-minute set with no mistakes and it sold like hot cakes.

  Videos lifted my earnings to another level. Within a few years of releasing my first one, I was among the bestselling video artists in Britain, my tapes often at the top of the charts, outselling big names such as U2 or the Rolling Stones. What with the shows and the tapes, the money was rolling in and I could buy the kind of things I’d never dreamed of twenty years earlier when I’d been a labourer in Middlesbrough – cars costing more than I’d previously paid for houses and artworks to put on my walls. Meanwhile, George moved house again, inviting us to his house-warming party.