“Then he asked if we could use the Sunset View house as a location.”
What! I was TOLD that this is where the filming would be. I don’t go around asking people if I can film in their houses. What is this -Cash In The Attic?
“If you know anything of Morrissey you’ll know it is not unusual for him to ... disappear during a gig,” ... oh really? such as ... when? and how exactly do I “disappear”?
Through icy fog?
Finally, Rustle KNOWS I’d walk over hot coals to read at his funeral ... I mean, to do ANYTHING he requires, but let decorum and dignity be today’s watchwords, otherwise I’ll set the pugs loose. Please give him these notes, and my undying love.
thanks
M
This eloquent evisceration demonstrates the price of my devotion almost as clearly as one disastrous night in London, to which he refers.
I went to see him perform at the Roundhouse in Camden, a cool venue that I’d played not long before and the only place in England the Doors ever played – plus the Ramones did it too. Surprisingly Morrissey’s shows have a disproportionately high yob fraternity in attendance. I think a certain kind of working-class male have Moz as their only emotional outlet, along perhaps with football. That night I was there with a pretty young woman who’d never heard of the Smiths, causing the revaluation of my life to become a more pressing priority, but not yet, for now the hedonism was sufficient distraction still. In attendance along with the yobs and the wistful were an impressive selection of British celebrities. I was sat quite near Little Britain star and long-time friend David Walliams (who, in spite of incessantly ribbing, I adore on account of his beautiful heart which he keeps in his oafish chest), David Baddiel (who was one of my favourite comics as a teenager and who is now one quarter of my idealised domestic template), and further along the row I saw dear Jonathan Ross.
If you know anything of Morrissey you’ll know it is not unusual for him to cancel gigs or disappear during them. We his fans accept this as part of his genius and a price worth paying. On this evening, three songs in, with all looking well and the mic cable swooshing like a good ’un, M’s voice began to falter, crack and finally toppled like Saddam’s Baghdad statue. So off he went, a bit like Saddam. Also like Saddam it would be bloody difficult to persuade him to return. The yobs grew restless. Boz Boorer, lead guitar, and the rest of Morrissey’s band shuffled about like a football team trying to compensate for the sending off of a star player, but if Rooney’s been sent off you can’t plug the hole by getting Boz Boorer to drift upfield and play with his back to goal; he doesn’t have the pace. The band looked at each other and wondered what to do, the yob rumble grew louder. Walliams leaned over. “You know what,” he whispered, “you should go up there and do stand-up.”
“Fuck off!” I said, in spite being the kind of attention-seeking missile who’d love to explode into that war zone.
Jen Ivory, Moz’s mate and safety net, was sat behind us and overheard. “You know what, that’s not a bad idea.” It was a bad idea. “I’ll go up if you come,” I said to Walliams.
“Alright. Let’s ask Jonathan.”
David B wisely swerved it but Jonathan said, “Yeah alright, it should be a laugh,” an attitude he was employing a bit too freely.
So we agreed, the three of us would go up and make the announcement. I saw a flicker of relief betrayed on Jen’s face as the four of us (David B came to gawk from the wings) made our way from the seats and to the backstage area. I felt we were like vainglorious musketeers marching to a well-choreographed battle. What we actually were was dickheads.
I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred the awful dread that rose in my guts as the three of us walked on to that stage into a storm of boos and bottles. Never has the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” ever seemed so poignant. They slaughtered us, as if they sensed the motivating vanity behind the altruistic veneer. It’d been a long time since I’d been jeered on stage, even the VMA audience had the courtesy to be silent, but these derisive cries took me back to the terrible time when the sound that now drowned me was as familiar as the sound of my own heartbeat. Jonathan made a quick announcement but the crowd wanted only two things: either Morrissey or blood, and Morrissey wasn’t coming back. I tried to lighten things up with a few jokes, using my experience with dealing with hostile crowds – they were not buying. In the back of my mind I remembered the beautiful girl I was there with and burned with a further circle of shame. Walliams was struck with a bottle top and went down like JFK – that was probably the only good thing that came from the whole god-awful experience.
Morrissey later thanked me and offered the words, “You may be a whiz on Opportunity Knocks* but that doesn’t mean you can play any audience.”
I learned a painful lesson that night. Don’t go on to a stage if your name isn’t on the bill. Also that the crowd can turn as fast and as fierce as the tide. Beware the wrath of the masses, beware the rage of the mob.
* A popular Seventies talent show – a beige X Factor.
†
Chapter 17
He’s from Barcelona
It was the biggest media event since Princess Diana died. An event that received as much news coverage as the mysterious death of the most famous woman in the world. When it happened it was blown up like 9/11. It was on the front page of every newspaper, every day, for almost a month. Every television news broadcast opened with the story. Twenty-four-hour rolling news channels rolled with the news for twenty-four hours. It was analysed, debated and contested by an entire nation. Even the country’s leader, the Prime Minister, was involved when it was discussed in the Houses of Parliament. What was it? A prank phone call. And who done it? I did.
Meredith, the acupuncturist in London who I visit in her electronic hermitude, would in less enlightened times have been burned as a witch. Once she told me that within me I have a supernova black hole of destructive energy. She said that the magnetism within was so powerful that people and things around me would need to be powerfully centred or they’d be sucked in and destroyed. I took that to be a metaphysical endorsement of my charisma, I didn’t realise it could have such material and far-reaching consequences.
Back in England, bruised from the VMAs, all I wanted was simple familiarity. The radio show had become one of the constants in my life, a pleasant routine that had abided for several years where me and my mates would together produce and perform a show. Made by Vanity Projects, it was ours, which gave us control. Plus Lesley Douglas, the all-powerful controller of the station, loved me so I was indulged like the world’s naughtiest little boy. The show had a loyal audience of around a million people, some listening live, many more listening to the podcasts on iTunes, which was rare on Radio 2, whose listeners are traditionally older. In fact Radio 2, within the BBC, a proud and traditional organisation, is perhaps the most respectable and professional outlet.
Our show was a shameless, late-night boys’ club. Cool and stupid. Yet sometimes esoteric and tender. I knew it would be difficult for me to do the show without Matt, and I didn’t know how to resolve the situation after the VMAs, or when we’d start doing the show together again. It turned out that would not be relevant.
Matt and I were funny together. Looking back at some of the shows I am astonished when I recall that they were thrown together without preparation or concern. They were a giddy waltz through me and Matt’s tumultuous friendship, though other people got on board, notably Noel Gallagher. Have a look at some of these beautiful moments:
STUDIO. DAY.
MATT
What about your up-to-date thing you did the other day? “What if Crippen didn’t do it?”
You said it like it’s in the news at the moment! You’re such a Victorian weirdo.
RUSSELL
I very nearly dropped my monocle when I realised Dr Crippen may be innocent!
MATT
What if Jack the Ripper is two people? With similar techniques!?
RUSSELL
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Now, Matthew, I’ve been working on a cure for rickets.
What a delightful improvised exchange. The listeners enjoyed it because it was live and warm as well as being a little dangerous. The next exchange about Paddington Bear wouldn’t trouble the censors, though.
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
Why was Paddington Bear at Paddington station if he’s going from Chile to Peru? Paddington station isn’t en route!
MATT
He wasn’t. He was from Peru.
RUSSELL
Right, where’s he going then?
MATT
To visit his uncle.
RUSSELL
Well, where does his uncle live?
MATT
In London.
RUSSELL
He’s not got an uncle in London! A bear living in London? It’d be all over the papers! He’d be tearing people up! What about Gentle Ben? He went off the tracks for half an hour and they cancelled the show! You can’t have a bear in London, Matt! Bad planning!
Also Matt called me on my madness. If I had done something churlish or embarrassing during the week, Matt wouldn’t hesitate to bring it up on air. Like when he brought up this tantrum I’d had in Montreal because a hotel room wasn’t nice enough, causing me to sink into a peculiar depression.
STUDIO. DAY.
MATT
So why did you pull your hat down over your face? Was it about hotels?
RUSSELL
There was no natural light in my room, Matt!
MATT
What? Why do you need natural light? You’re not a jeweller!
RUSSELL
How am I meant to judge these rubies with no natural light??
MATT
You fool. Besides, if it was about natural light how would pulling your hat over your face help?
RUSSELL
Well that was part of my protest! If I can’t have any natural light I’ll deny myself all light!!
MATT
Pulling your hat down over your face? That’s not the worst thing you can do if you’re depressed, Russell. “Oh yeah, I got so depressed I pulled my hat right down over my face, no one could see me then.”
RUSSELL
One time I was so depressed I put my left shoe on my right foot and vice versa.
The above wittering is a typical representation of the dynamic between me and Matt. Noel was able to seamlessly fit in with the recurring themes of revolution and provocation. He too is a man who likes if not to court controversy, certainly enjoys giving controversy’s arse an occasional squeeze.
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
I would like to take this opportunity to say I am better than Jesus himself! A nicer man, an all-round good egg. And you name a religion and its key icon, I’d like to say I dress nicer, sexier and have a better message ...
NOEL G
Scientology!
RUSSELL
Not that one! That’s a good one!
He won that round! Never tangle with the Scientologists, even I know that. But the monarchy? What are they gonna do?
STUDIO. DAY.
RUSSELL
When I met the Queen it was comparable to the meeting of Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I or the Earl of Essex and Queen Elizabeth I. I’m a great member of the court of this country, I’ll rise up, I’ll probably have a knighthood soon.
NOEL
What did she smell like?
RUSSELL
Lovely, like autumn and pears. I held her hand in my hand for a moment and the two of us dreamed of what might have been.
NOEL
What did she say?
RUSSELL
“You know what young man, I wish I had fifteen minutes with you, I’d give you such a reach-round,” she said.
NOEL
(doing Queen voice)
“Do you have any gear?”
RUSSELL
Because I’ll tell you what, I’m clucking like mad.
My relentless pontificating on revolution and a new social order came in for a lot of deserved abuse. Insanely I still believe in this stuff.
STUDIO. DAY.
MATT
Have you been thinking about your religion/ new order?
RUSSELL
Yes, I have actually, Matt, and I’ve got a few more theories for it to make it absolutely watertight. We’ll all be living on a nice island, vegetarians, doing yoga and that. We’ll get rid of ideas such as the nuclear family and like in African tribes the word “mother” will mean all female members of the tribe and the word “father” will mean all male members. There will be a lot of [wolf whistles] ... and also we’re not going to have no more currency, stuff like that, no brain-bending or mind-washing and we’ll all be free to explore ourselves, although there will be an age of consent and it’ll be the same as usual so as people don’t go, “Oh no ...”.
MATT
Pretty watertight, isn’t it?
RUSSELL
Pretty watertight so far, Matt, I’d like to see a political theorist drive a bus through that. If so where did he get his licence? As we’re in charge of issuing bus licences and they’re not issued to possible dissenters, who are immediately killed on Traitor’s Cove – one of the nicest parts of our island, decorated with all lovely corpses.
MATT
No one’s holding their breath for your revolution ...
RUSSELL
Well good!!! ... cos that’s not part of the plan ... I don’t want a load of wheezing asthmatics ...
But mainly I just loved the rapport between me and Matt and the velocity of the spontaneity.
We spent a lot of time gently bating authority and teasing the media, leaving stupid, unplanned answerphone messages for forgetful guests and unsuspecting newspaper editors when we couldn’t get through and interrupting the channel’s own news broadcasts with childish interludes. Soon though we’d take over the news entirely. When Matt and I weren’t speaking I brought in well-known entertainers to take his place, well, to do the show with me – no one could ever take his place. Top notch they were.
Noel Gallagher was obviously part of the show’s furniture – and not a nice piece of furniture, a rickety old grandfather clock who doesn’t know what time it is, farts on the hour and lives in the past. Some of the best comedians in the country came and joined in: Alan Carr, a camp variety stand-up but sharp as a tack (and beloved of Morrissey, you may recall); Noel Fielding, a sexy young Python (Monty, I mean, not a boa constrictor); David Walliams, who came in and unsettled me with his David Niven charm and Kenneth Williams sneer; Simon Amstell, the puppy-dog-eyed assassin, killing you with acerbity and kindness; David Baddiel, one of my comedy heroes and now an intellectual elder statesman of the craft; bizarrely the Hollywood auteur and cinematic genius Oliver Stone, with whom I’m making a documentary; and, best of all, Jonathan Ross, who for twenty years has straddled British television and ridden it like a horse-prostitute.
I’m very proud of my friendship with Jonathan as I indicated earlier. He brought me into his family, gave me great advice and used his shows to launch my career. Which is why what happened next is so extraordinary.
Jonathan is a roaring alpha male. When in his company socially, it is plain to see why such a man would become the nation’s host every Friday night. He is strong, witty, garrulous and sensitive to others. When he’s compering an award show he’s in complete control, and on his own BBC1 Friday night chat show he expertly steers the biggest stars in the world. I suppose he must’ve seen coming on my show as a punk busman’s holiday, doing a job he’s good at but with the shackles of responsibility he’s long worn due to his position loosened. The Radio 2 shows were broadcast from BBC2 HQ in Western House on Great Portland Street. The building has all the facilities of modern media as its organs, but from the outside it is a staunch and imposing edifice, a talisman of the world’s most respected broadcasting organisation.
Jonathan arrived like Mr Toad in a fun convertible an
d driving gloves, I arrived simultaneously with a beautiful, six-foot dancer I was seeing. We were both in character. The show was to be pre-recorded, not broadcast live, to accommodate our busy schedules. Waiting patiently upstairs as usual were Mr Gee and Nic Philps, the vicar’s son and BBC’s representative producer who we all adored and ridiculed, telling him his involvement in our operation was an affront to his father and yes, the Holy Father, God himself. Gareth was there to produce, with a specific portfolio regarding comedic content. Do you remember Gareth from earlier chapters? His blunders? His ability to say the wrong thing? Him? He was there. Also in attendance were a few engineers and a journalist who’d been following me for a Nylon magazine cover story.
Like every week, there was a cursory run-through of the show’s itinerary to which, like every week, I didn’t listen. But now of course I recall with Alaskan clarity the contents of that show, as well as the usual items: “Gay!” (where we’d solve a gay problem – always the same one, “I’m gay, I fancy my mate,” as was the solution, “Fuck him then”), callers, a competition (without prizes, as the Beeb were forever being pilloried by the country’s privately owned print media for trivial indiscretions like the value of competition prizes), and a few guests. This week it was Mexican actor and heartthrob Gael Garcia Brunel, respected, elderly comic writer Dennis Norden, and the actor who played Manuel in the sublime sitcom masterpiece Fawlty Towers, Andrew Sachs. Andrew Sachs was to guest on the phone – a “phoner” they call it in the trade. There were several reasons for him being on the show: 1. His performance as the iconic, bumbling Spanish waiter had captured the hearts of the nation when the show was first broadcast in the mid Seventies and had never let go. 2. He was promoting a TV programme or a product, that’s why most people go on shows. And 3. Because of a story that I’d told on air the previous week. David Baddiel had been co-hosting with me that week. David, as well as being extremely funny himself, is a great comic foil – he identifies areas, imperceptibly and intuitively where his comedic partner can be funny. This is why he’s been half of two phenomenally successful double-acts: firstly with the beautiful comedian Rob Newman in the early Nineties at the birth of the British “Comedy Rock’n’Roll” movement (in which Noel Fielding and I were currently being richly rewarded)– which was the first time comics played arenas; and then with Frank Skinner in the mid Nineties as part of the “New Lad” movement which also comprised Oasis, Euro 96 (an international football competition held in England) and Chris Evans. Not to mention a hugely successful partnership with his supremely talented and undeserved partner, the comedian Morwenna Banks, with whom he has two chokingly beautiful children. The funniest bit of the previous week’s show came when David recounted a tale about me which had excited him. He spoke of an occasion when he visited me in Hampstead, London (we’re neighbours) one Saturday and was surprised upon discovering that among the guests in my swish town house that morning had been a female burlesque dance troupe I’d been dating called the “Satanic Sluts” and my mother, called Babs. David was understandably confused to find such opposing entities present at the same breakfast. The Satanic Sluts and Barbara Brand. One a lovable mum, the other, of course, a group of satanic sluts. That’s not to say they won’t become lovable mothers themselves one day or that my mum won’t become a satanic slut, but for now they occupied two very distinct territories – and just one kitchen table. Actually the Satanic Sluts and my mum had got along just fine. It was like a mismatched buddy comedy: “She’s a loving mum, they’re a striptease act that worship the devil – forced to drive across America to find the Holy Grail; yet maybe they’re not so different after all!” My mum can get on with anyone, she’s a very warm, loving woman and highly non-judgemental. She’s had to be, she raised a lunatic – if she’d been too judgemental I’d’ve been for the noose. My mum, the Satanic Sluts and I had already taken our morning stroll through genteel Hampstead, twenty-five miles and a world away from Grays where I’d grown up. Hampstead is liberal, intellectual and bourgeois; Grays isn’t. Along the way we’d picked up an umbrella for me mum to protect her from the autumnal London drizzle and I’d brilliantly dubbed it the M-umbrella, because it was my mum’s; I know, I know – it’s what I do. Back from our jaunty walk beneath my mum’s mum-brella, “brella, brella, brella, brella, hey, hey, hey” the Satanic Sluts and I had retired upstairs for some recreation, or re-creation, depending on my attitude to contraception that morning, whilst my mum made tea. That’s when ol’ Dave turned up. Fascinated by my peculiar life he began to quiz the Sluts. Not far into David’s prurient interrogation, Georgina, very much the leader of the Sluts (like Mike Nesmith in the Monkees), revealed that her grandfather was national treasure and comedy star of yester-decade Andrew Sachs. What a delicious piece of trivia, thought Dave. I was already privy to this tickly titbit as, during a prior conjugal encounter with the Sluts, Fawlty Towers had come on my television and Georgina said, “Oh look, there’s my grand-dad.” I tried not to let this potentially disruptive information put me off my stroke. “WHERE?!” I shouted, pulling the sheets up over me ’arris, thinking he might be under the bed having a Werther’s Original or a fit, but Georgina clarified that she meant on the telly. Well, me and the other Sluts were relieved I can tell you, and I for one, a massive fan of the show and Manuel in particular, began to ask what he was like. “Does he really speak in that voice?” I enquired. Now it was Georgina’s turn to be put off her game and a few of the other Sluts didn’t like the granddad chatter, so the topic was shelved until a more obvious break in the proceedings could be identified. When that break arrived, ages later, seriously, AGES and AGES (that’s the trouble with dating a dance troupe, there’s loads of ’em and there has to be equal opportunity like in the Cuban Gobstopper Testing Society, so I had a terrible jaw ache. Also like in the Cuban Gobstopper Testing Society), I asked her more about her granddad and she told me what a lovely fella he was. Of course.
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