Showbusiness - The Diary of a Rock 'n' Roll Nobody

by Mark Radcliffe

  Apart from the bald Barry Sheen of the Brummie band scene there’s not much else of interest to say about Judas Priest, and they would undoubtedly be but a footnote in the annals of rock were it not for one key event. In 1985 in deepest Nevada two adolescents attempted a shotgun suicide pact, which one of them survived, after the repeated playing of a Judas Priest album. Well, eager to escape the sonic torture, most of us would have simply taken a cigarette lighter and refashioned the vinyl artefact as an ornamental plant pot, but you can imagine how they felt. The whole affair might have ended there, were it not for a bizarre court case in which the boys’ parents attempted to sue the band for damages on account of the demonic messages placed subliminally within their songs. The understandably distraught families insisted that Rob Halford had peppered the Priest preposteropus with backwards slogans from the Prince of Darkness encouraging the impressionable youngsters to blow their brains out. This always seemed unlikely to me. For starters, would a band who’d achieved success beyond their wildest dreams get involved in a scheme to systematically eradicate their fan base? I think not, and, in any case, if Satan wanted to get a message to the youth of the world it seems odd that he would put it backwards at low volume in a Judas Priest album track. In terms of getting your manifesto across, you’re leaving an awful lot to chance there, as I’m sure the Mephistophelean campaign management team told him. If you’d been the satanic spin doctor, wouldn’t you have told him to hang fire and damnation and do a future deal with the Spice Girls? Thankfully, common sense prevailed and the Priest were cleared of any dark dealings or wrongdoings, but not before the trial descended into pure farce. At one point the judge asked the grieving mums and dads if they’d noticed any abnormal behaviour in their hirsute offspring before their tragic deaths. Well, of course they had, the idiots had been locked in the bedroom listening to Judas Priest. If that’s not abnormal, I don’t know what is.

  Thankfully, that night in Bolton Albert Hall Judas Priest inspired in us a different kind of hysteria. That of uncontrollable laughter. From their turgid songs and self-indulgent solos to their clod-hopping platform boots and charmless vocalist caterwauling ‘Whisky Woman Way-ay-ay’, they provided an evening of unrelenting, if unintentional, comedy. We were young and impressionable and we’d never seen a real band before, but even we thought they were rubbish. We came out of that gig wiping the tears from our eyes and totally convinced about one thing. We didn’t know what our new band was going to be like, but it was definitely going to be nothing like Judas Priest.

  Several weeks later came a gig that would leave us slack-jawed in awe and admiration. David Bowie, and in particular the Ziggy Stardust album, had for some months captured our imaginations like no previous record. Night after night we pored over the sleeve looking for hitherto undiscovered twists in the lyrics as the eponymous rock’n’roll hero descended into tragedy and suicide. Perhaps he’d been locked in his bedroom listening to Judas Priest. The combination of Bowie’s stories and singing, interspersed with the razor slashes of the late Mick Ronson’s guitar, provided a cocktail that still seems pretty potent to me, but there was more to it than that.

  There was the sexual ambivalence for a start: was Bowie straight? Was he gay? Was he bisexual? Was he in fact a woman? This last question was to all intents and purposes answered when we saw a picture of him on-stage in what looked like a Japanese-print bathing costume with, unless he’d taken to carrying slices of bacon about in his pants, one dangling testicle easing itself out of the skimpy and overtight gusset. You have to remember that none of us had travelled much. If we had been familiar with the fleshpots of Bangkok we’d have known that there were all kinds of hybrids that could further complicate matters and that the possession of a pair of bollocks was by no means a guarantee that their owner was 100 per cent male. However, we were pretty confident that Bowie was a bloke, but the next question to be addressed was whether or not he was a bloke from another world? His songs were sprinkled with references to space and starmen, and what’s more, his eyes didn’t match. This was proof enough to many of my contemporaries that he had come from Jupiter. (This would have made him a Jovian, which I initially thought was the technical term for a member of Bon Jovi. Bowie turned out to be from Brixton.) The point was that at that time, at that age, in that town, David Bowie was the biggest and most glamorous star imaginable and he lived in a world so far removed from ours that extraterrestrial origin seemed a distinct possibility. The Man Who Fell to Earth he may very well have been, but he certainly hadn’t crash-landed round our way. Not once was there a sighting of an androgynous alien with his balls hanging out dusting himself down at Harper Green Bowling Club or in the car park of the Jolly Crofters on Chorley Old Road.

  We went to see Bowie at the Manchester Hardrock. The Hardrock was the north-west’s foremost rock venue at this time and played host to all the heavyweight acts, including Led Zeppelin, Slade, Roxy Music and the Faces. However, you weren’t guaranteed a great night out, as they were also in the habit of booking Uriah Heap. Originally constructed as a ten-pin bowling alley, the Hardrock building is still standing next to the Old Trafford cricket ground and is now a branch of the DIY superstore B & Q. Walking round there in search of the ultimate self-tapping screw, I could swear I heard eerie reverberations from the rock’n’roll grave. Was that really just a squeaking store-room door or was it a ghostly Mick Ronson guitar line echoing round mixer taps? Was that rumble the sound of tins of paint being delivered or was it deceased Zeppelin drummer John Bonham practising paranormal paradiddles in power tools? Back then it was packed with frenzied Bowie-ites who’d paid the princely sum of £1 to stand or £1.25 to sit down. We paid £1.25 to sit (somewhere near shower curtains and accessories by my calculations), but when the lights went down we jumped up and in our excitement rushed towards the stage, which I’m fairly certain was in the space now occupied by vinyl floor coverings.

  Mind you, we’d had plenty of time to get excited, because we’d been standing outside since two o’clock in the afternoon. My anticipation had actually begun early in the morning as I attempted to decide what to wear to worship at the altar of the high priest of tinsel and tat. I toyed with the idea of my sister’s fun-fur bomber jacket and cork-soled platform sandals with a pair of white parallel trousers purchased from Stolen From Ivor. I flirted with the concept of my gran’s Lurex twin-set in ensemble with army combat pants and baseball boots. In the end I plumped for a navy-blue Shetland wool pullover and some shapeless corduroys in that nondescript colour of green so beloved of employees of garden centres. When I come to think about it, that’s pretty much all I ever wore in those days. In band photographs of that time the others are wearing leather jackets, sunglasses and Cuban-heeled boots while I appear to have been mistakenly caught in frame while collecting library fines.

  When David Bowie walked on stage that night and launched into ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, it gave me a thrill I’d never felt before or since. He was our idol, our god, and here he was in the flesh, in the same room as us. Charging through the songs we knew note for note, he held our very dreams in his hands, and if he’d finished the gig by being tele-transported into a flying saucer hovering overhead and whisked off to Venus, we couldn’t have been more amazed. In reality he was manhandled into a Ford Granada and whisked off to the Piccadilly Hotel, but nothing could puncture our euphoria. As we walked back across Manchester to get the number eight night bus to Bolton, we talked about what we’d seen and how it had defined our ideas for the new band. We were going to write our own songs, we were going to have spiky haircuts and if our mums weren’t looking we were going to wear make-up.

  At this juncture the Berlin Airlift was still a going concern. Guy Farringdon had been replaced by not one but two guitarists called Jeff ‘Carry’ Carrington and Mark ‘Stocky’ Sayers. This wasn’t because no single musician could attempt to replicate the dexterity of the absent Eric, but because Carry and Stocky were best mates and, like buying the last two guinea-pigs i
n the pet-shop, it seemed a shame to break them up. This meant that on one side of the stage we now had three guitarists competing for attention, solos, and not least, considering the elephantine girth of Jerry Lumley, floor space. The logical solution to this would have been to move one of them to the other side to keep Davey Bright company, but then their lead would have been too short to plug into the single Selmer amplifier they all shared. And, in any case, standing next to the hyperactive Bright in full hair-flinging mode always carried the risk of getting showered with airborne dandruff, quite possibly interspersed with low-flying nits. As things turned out, overcrowding in the guitarists’ ghetto proved short-lived as, sick of jostling for position, Jerry Lumley upped and left, taking Davey Bright with him to form a new band called Zwolff that would later play a memorable gig which the curate immortalised in the church magazine as ‘certainly louder than the normal pow-wows we hold in the scout hut’. Hey, rock’n’roll.

  With ranks thus depleted, desperate measures were called for and desperate measures were taken as in some desperation we recruited Michael ‘Doris’ Lipsey as lead vocalist. Michael, who’d adopted the nickname Doris in homage to his hero Alice Cooper, had all the things you look for in a lead singer bar one: he couldn’t sing. He had a microphone, an echo unit, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, a great pair of cheek-bones, a meticulously dishevelled hairstyle and an impressive approximation of soporific disinterest some regarded as charisma, but he couldn’t sing to save his life. We didn’t worry unduly about this, however, because every time we’d performed in public so far the vocals had proved to be completely inaudible anyway, so the fact that our method front man was tone-deaf wasn’t likely to become public knowledge.

  The vacant bass player’s position was filled by the genial Sayers, who gladly swapped instruments and stage positions if only to get away from the now sole guitarist, Jeff Carrington. In his own head, a space of considerable capacity, Carrington’s fretboard wizardry had seen off the other two pretenders to his throne. In reality, both had vacated his immediate vicinity because he was a right royal pain in the arse. In musicians’ parlance, he’d developed delusions of adequacy. Sayers the bass, though, proved a revelation. He was really good at it, by which I mean he didn’t attempt anything fancy but supplied a huge shuddering noise as if a rhythm had been programmed into a concrete mixer. This is just what you want in a rock band, the simple root-note stuff and not all that slapping around popularised by Mark King out of Level 42, which sounds like a wagon-load of wet fish being delivered backstage. Come the revolution, slap bass players will be straight up against that wall along with taxi-drivers, traffic wardens, tax inspectors, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Jimmy Tarbuck, John Redwood and, I would imagine, disc jockeys. No matter how brilliant you are on the bass guitar, you should understand that it is not a lead instrument. It never has been and never will be, and bassists who refuse to accept this are trouble. Look at Sting. In many ways I think the world would have been a better place if Sting and Mark Sayers had changed places. Mark is now a top accountant, and if Sting had had one ounce of his financial acumen perhaps he’d have noticed his own accountant making off with several million quid. As for Mark, well, I can’t be sure he’d have saved the rain forest but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have released Ten Summoner’s Tales. Coincidentally they’ve both stayed pretty fit. Mark still plays rugby on a regular basis and Sting practises yoga with a suppleness that enables him to put his body in all kinds of unusual positions, which is no great surprise as he’s had his head up his arse for years.

  In rehearsals Stocky and I were shaping up to be a rhythm section which aspired to mediocrity. We were stokers in the engine room, brothers-in-arms, sultans of swing, and we had so much in common it was spooky. We were both called Mark, both went to Bolton School and both played in a band called the Berlin Airlift. I mean, statistically, what are the chances of that happening? In addition he was tall, dark, strong and handsome. I was dark, too.

  Since our trip to the Bowie concert, Doris and I had been determined to inject a bit of sparkle and show business into the band, which meant that Carrington had to go. He was a reasonable player, but he had none of the Ronsonesque showmanship we were searching for. In addition he was dashingly good-looking, in a clean-cut sort of way, and was nearly as big a hit with the girls as he was with himself. What we needed was a real plank-spanking pig-ugly Flash Harry who’d write all the songs and leave the chicks, should there ever be any, to the rest of us. The only man in Bolton who fitted this description was Barry Brightwell.

  Baz was a bit older than us, and so it was with some trepidation that we embarked on a fact-finding mission to Green Lane Cricket Club in order to watch him in action with Voyd, a band he’d formed with several other like-minded social misfits. Within seconds of clapping eyes on Brightwell, we knew we’d found our man. He had a Gibson SG, which he could play lightning fast not only in the usual position but also behind his head and with his tongue, though not at the same time obviously, and not in tune necessarily. He was also a real snappy dresser, sporting an electric-blue satin jacket and flared jeans he’d emblazoned with potato prints in bleach, a principle he’d also applied to his straw-like shoulder-length hair. The only slight flaw in his otherwise perfect image was that his general build made Jerry Lumley seem positively anorexic. Baz was gargantuan – one of those fat people whose flesh seems to be moving in several different directions at once under their clothes. As a result of carting round his colossal body weight, he had a puce complexion, beads of sweat permanently running down his forehead and stagnant patches of perspiration indelibly stamped under the arms of every tent-like shirt he possessed. All three of them. He was known locally as Percy Filth, and let’s just say that if you were luxuriating in the jacuzzi at a health club and spotted a betrunked Barry Brightwell waddling towards you, you’d hop out smartish. This was hypothetical, of course, because he’d never been near a health club. Fortunately Doris, who knew everyone, knew Barry and attempted to convince him to throw his not inconsiderable lot in with us because we were ‘young, lean, hungry and headed for the top’. In point of fact we were young, lean, hungry and headed for the chippy near Doffcocker Lodge. Brightwell looked at us with that peculiarly gormless expression of his, before wiping the froth from the corners of his mouth and slurring ‘All right, brothers, I’m with you.’ We cheered, slapped him on the back and embraced, which took him a bit by surprise because he only thought he’d agreed to join us for steak pudding and chips. However, once we arrived at the chip shop we pooled our bus fares home to buy him a second pie and he was putty in our hands. Which was a distinctly unpleasant sensation.

  The only problem we had now was off-loading the strutting peacock Carrington, and as none of us had the bottle to confront him face to face I hatched an ingenious plan. Well, to be strictly truthful, I pinched it off Status Quo. Following the departure of drummer John Coghlan, who left to form his own band, Diesel (nice career move, John), the most appropriately named band of all time were basically a creative, if that’s the right word, nucleus of Francis Rossi, Rick Parfitt and Alan Lancaster. Now at some point Rossi, the bald pony-tailed one, and Parfitt, the blond haystacked one, decided to have a break from the band. At this point Lancaster, the unpleasantly moustachioed one, packed up his bass and his Carmen heated rollers and emigrated to Australia, only to find on touchdown in Oz that his erstwhile mates had regrouped with a new bass player before he’d even cleared Heathrow airspace. I’m with Rick and Francis on this one. Anyone with big curly hair and a moustache like Alan Lancaster deserves everything they get.

  So, all we had to do was call a band meeting in the boozer and announce that we were splitting up; then, as soon as Carry had strapped on his helmet (large, naturally) and pootled off on his Honda 50, the rest of us could come out from behind the bins, re-enter the pub through the snug bar and toast to future success with the glam-rock warthog Brightwell. This historic summit took place at the Halliwell Lodge Hotel and went more or less ac
cording to plan as we all told the shell-shocked Carrington we were quitting. Unfortunately a snot-flying-drunk Percy Filth arrived early and announced he was leaving the Berlin Airlift as well, despite the fact that he’d never been in it in the first place. Convincing Carry that this was obviously some raving lunatic on day release from the local mental hospital (and, believe me, there were trained psychiatrists who’d have happily gone along with that), we sank a last half of mild as the Berlin Airlift and went our separate ways. Well, one of us did anyway. Minutes later, the rest of us were back at the bar for our first half of mild as the new band. The only thing we had to sort out was a name. Status Quo characteristically persevered with the same name, although a token change may well have been in order. As their sound has got progressively less meaty over the years, Status Quorn would have been appropriate.

  Barry wanted to call the band Percy Filth, which indicated that, as egomaniacal lead guitarists went, we’d hopped out of the frying pan and into an even bigger, hotter, greasier frying pan. Doris, by now spectacularly bladdered, proclaimed that we should be Humphrey and the Wet Farts, which, I have to admit, sounds pretty good to me now. I’d been drawing a cartoon about a boy who spends so much time looking at the moon that his face turns into a reflection of it. I’ve no idea where this idea came from, though it may have been conceived while I was under the influence of malted milk. The boy in the story was called Billy Moon and I thought that was a great name for a band. Mark, being Mark, said, ‘I’ll do what Mark wants.’ So we had a vote, taken admittedly while B.B. king-size was making another of his interminable toilet visits and Doris was sitting upright only with the help of a pool cue wedged between his shoulder-blades, and the name Billy Moon won the ballot unanimously: two votes cast, one abstention in absentia, one spoilt ballot paper.