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

by Mark Radcliffe

  Billy Moon rehearsed regularly in the attic of my parents’ house, where I’d painted a picture of our lunar-headed mascot on the wall next to the poster of Pan’s People. Pan’s People were a troupe of girls who used to dance in their knickers to one song each week on Top Of The Pops. You never knew whereabouts in the programme they would turn up, but curiously enough, no matter whose house you were watching it at, the announcement of their appearance coincided with your mate’s dad entering the room whistling casually and generally feigning nonchalance. He would leave the room on three legs one song later, muttering disparaging remarks along the lines of ‘Noisy rubbish, young people’s pop music’ and ‘Bit of national service, good tune, Glenn Miller, never did me any harm’, or words to that effect.

  In contrast to the Berlin Airlift, the Moon oeuvre was made up predominantly of original material, that’s to say, tunes that were self-penned, not tunes that broke exciting new musical ground. Songwriter-in-chief was the gibbering heap of lard, Percy, whose compositions, like those of many prolific songwriters, returned time and again to one central theme. With Bob Dylan it was political struggle and change, with Nick Drake it was isolation and love unrequited, with Bowie it was a passage to other worlds, with Difford and Tilbrook it was the ability of small lives to triumph over adversity, and with Barry Brightwell it was what he’d done, or would like to do, to his girlfriend Janet.

  Janet was a petite, bespectacled mouse of a woman in a floral-print skirt and white nylon blouse who outwardly appeared perfectly sane. This must have been a faÇade, because if she’d been perfectly sane she’d never have gone out with Barry. The image of that sweaty peroxide-haired mammoth with his satin strides round his ankles leaping on top of this meek individual is one that has stayed with me down the years, and the fact that she sat in on rehearsals while the Filthster broadcast their intimate moments in song never ceased to amaze me. Some of his lyrics had a certain na?¨ve charm, such as ‘She’s a real humdinger – Polaroid swinger, yeh’, while others had an earthier appeal. I particularly recall the heart-rending tale of the time Janet wouldn’t let him into her size-eight pants because it was the wrong time of the month. To ease his frustration, he’d got paralytic in town only to find himself without bus fare walking home in the rain feeling, to quote the title of the piece, ‘pissed up, pissed through and pissed off’. Now I’m not claiming he was Leonard Cohen, but these words were positively poetic compared to other gems from the Brightwell canon, such as ‘Vaseline Queen’, ‘Gravy Down the Legs’ and ‘I’ll Give Her One from You’. Still, we reassured ourselves that no one would hear the catalogue of depravities droned out through an inadequate PA system by the tuneless Lipsey, and safe in this knowledge set off for our début gig at the Parochial Hall.

  Transport had been a perennial problem in the past, but not any more. Stocky’s dad worked for a plastic-sheeting company and had promised us the use of a Ford Transit. Unfortunately, when we went to pick it up they’d put in some extra deliveries and so there was no van available. There was, however, an open-backed pick-up truck, so we borrowed that instead. Getting all the equipment on board proved no trouble at all, and Stocky was a perfectly able provisional licence-holding driver ensconced in his heated cab with the waiflike Janet in the passenger seat. For the rest of us the journey proved considerably less comfortable, not only because of the necessity of negotiating several unmade roads, but also because it was February and snowing heavily. Still, we arrived in one piece in a truck marked Dynamic Plastics, which it strikes me now is a much better name for a band than Billy Moon. If we’d become the Dynamic Plastics we’d have had our own personalised van, just like a proper pop group.

  Inside the Parochial Hall we started to position the equipment on stage. I built myself a drum riser from school desks in the time-honoured fashion of small drummers who’ll take all the height they can get. Mark Sayers set about building a monumental stack of speaker cabinets to my immediate left. One of them was actually genuine and contained four speakers. The other three were entirely empty and had been constructed from sheeting offcuts at Dynamic Plastics. Still, he’d glued proper speaker cloth to the front and it all looked hugely impressive. The rocking rhinoceros Brightwell had two cabinets but, more impressively, he had three boxes of lights. When we saw these, stencilled with the legend Percy Filth, we were speechless with admiration. To be honest, we’d envisaged them being placed at regular intervals across the stage, not arranged in horseshoe formation round his bulbous, satin-clad legs, but, as he eloquently argued, they were indeed ‘his bleeding lights’ and he could quite reasonably put them ‘where the frigging hell he liked’. Still, we had a few overhead lights left by the amateur dramatic society and our new resident electrical genius Andy Holdsworth had promised us something special for the opening sequence. Holdsworth had been recruited from the A-level physics set because, in the absence of Davey Bright, we had no one who could deal with circuitry in order to electrocute innocent bystanders. Nicknamed Menk, he had the worst case of acne I have ever seen, which caused much hilarity before gigs when, without fail, discussions about lighting would culminate in the long-suffering Holdsworth being asked, ‘And have you got any spots, Menk?’

  While all this was going on, our alleged singer was in the toilets applying make-up with a trowel to his sculpted features. He’d obtained a good deal of the cosmetics from his mother’s dressing-table while she was at bingo, but to be fair to him he hadn’t cleaned her out entirely. He wasn’t that unscrupulous and, thinking first and foremost of his dear old mum, he honourably pinched the rest from Boots. After about forty-five minutes he emerged with black rings round his eyes and mouth, and red stripes down each cheek. I think he thought he looked like David Bowie, but he looked more like a coal-miner who’d lost control of a ketchup dispenser to me.

  By now the hordes of fans were filling the hall and sales of Vimto were brisk. At around eight o’clock the support group Odyssey took to the stage. They were in the year below us at school and so we weren’t really worried, although they did boast a precocious talent on lead guitar in the Bolan-like form of Jed Hall. Hall would many years later turn up in a renowned north-western folk group called the Westhoughton Weavers, singing such traditional favourites as ‘The Lincolnshire Pig Castrator’s Daughter’, ‘Ho down merry down with a hey nonny fol de rol doo dey’ and ‘Where’s Me Pewter Tankard’, but back then, with his cherubic curls and wraparound shades, he was every inch the trainee rock star. They also had a rich kid called Fitzsimmons, whose dad had bought him an electronic organ, which did cause us some concern because, quite simply, we hadn’t got one. Within seconds of their opening number, Deep Purple’s ‘Black Night’, it became apparent that we had a slight problem on our hands: they were bloody brilliant. I’d previously only seen Barry Brightwell’s face glowing a luminous red, but when Jed Hall dispatched a note-perfect solo in ‘All Right Now’ it drained to an ashen white. A faithful reproduction of the twenty-five-minute Pink Floyd epic ‘Echoes’ had us crying into our crisps, and when Hall produced a flaming guitar and smashed it during the dying chords we knew we were in big trouble. The guitar in question was only a hastily emulsioned old acoustic but the damage was done.

  In the dressing-room our emotions boiled over:

  ‘Little bastards, they’re better than us.’

  ‘I’m going to get Jed Hall and punch his lights out.’

  ‘You know, I’d really like to go home now.’

  ‘Has anyone seen my eye-liner pencil?’

  Solemnly we made our final preparations. Baz crowbarred himself into the familiar satin and potato print, while Doris touched up the elaborate facial disguise, which to me was beginning to seem like a better idea with each passing minute. The athletic Stocky threw on a purple and black velvet jerkin, over which he hung a large, carved wooden cross, which seemed entirely appropriate given the impending crucifixion. Ever the dandy, I checked for wet patches in my corduroys before pulling off my Shetland pullover to reveal a nicely pre
ssed check shirt. Suitably attired, we took the short walk from death row and went up the stairs to the gallows.

  To create the maximum amount of tension and excitement, we took the stage in total darkness, which proved a costly mistake for our lanky and spectacularly cidered front man as he immediately cracked his head on a steel girder, knocking himself practically senseless and rearranging the meticulously applied make-up on his forehead into a kind a psychedelic smudge. As I sat centre stage in pitch-blackness wondering why the hell I was doing this – a thought that would cross my mind at regular intervals over the coming years – a loud, resonant farting noise emanated from the abyss stage left. Fortunately, this proved to be Stocky plugging his bass in. Unfortunately, the loud, resonant farting noise which almost immediately followed from the black hole stage right proved to be Percy Filth copiously breaking wind. Of course, we’d been blown away by Bowie making his entrance through a fog of dry ice, and one day hoped to launch into our first number amid swirling clouds of noxious gas, but not like this. The brimstone whiff of hell’s intestine did nothing to lift our spirits as Mark kick-started his bass to create the low rumble from which Led Zeppelin’s ‘Livin’ Lovin’ Maid’ would eventually materialise. This was the prearranged cue for Menk the Spot to dramatically unleash his lighting arsenal and bathe the stage in an atmospheric glow. He’d been instructed to pay particular attention to our stunning backdrop, which featured a three-foot-high cardboard cut-out of our mascot, Billy Moon. I’d been working on this for weeks with scissors, silver paint and several Pritt sticks, and was confident that it now looked like an entranced, unbearably cute little round-faced cartoon character who’d absorbed mystical lunar qualities. Looking at the photos now, it looks more like a dwarf who’s been hit with a frying pan while suffering from a severe case of the mumps. Mercifully, hardly anyone saw it, in any case, as the full mind-blowing Menk Holdsworth optical experience proved to consist of waiting for the first power chord, and then, bang on three seconds after the cue, throwing an impressive-looking lever to activate a standard sixty-watt household bulb hanging from a flex over the stage. Kiss at Castle Donnington it wasn’t.

  Incredibly, despite the debilitating nerves, Stocky and Percy executed the ‘Livin’ Lovin’ Maid’ riffs with admirable precision, though sadly not at the same time. To this day I have no idea how they managed it, but from the first flat line to escape from the mouth of the man in the mascara mask they were playing completely different sections of the song. It’s at times like this that you’re thankful for being the drummer. Sitting at the back out of range of all but the hardest-thrown Tizer cans, you simply put your head down and keep clobbering away until they’ve sorted themselves out or the song has finished. Whichever is the most unexpected.

  For the lead singer, the focus of all the attention down the front, the situation was little short of catastrophic. Already reeling from a potent combination of concussion and Strongbow, the gaily painted Doris was faced with a choice of which of his henchmen to follow. In no fit state to make such a choice, he settled instead for ploughing on in his adenoidal drone while shooting nervous glances left and right. His face, illuminated sporadically by a light show that was more public lavatory than Brixton Academy, resembled a giant ladybird fluttering backwards and forwards across the stage in some distress. Somehow we managed to reach the end of the Zeppelin classic within ten seconds of each other, and if Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones had been dead, they’d have been turning in their graves with John Bonham. Having triumphantly failed to please the crowd with the crowd-pleasing rock standard opener, we then launched into a brace of numbers from the forthcoming concept album Things to Make and Do When You Get in Janet’s Pants. To say the audience’s reaction remained muted during ‘Vaseline Queen’, ‘Polaroid Swinger’ and ‘Gravy Down the Legs’ is a bit like calling the critical response to Duran Duran’s 1995 cover versions album Thank You mixed, but we put this down to lack of familiarity with the material. Facing the same look of mass bafflement at future gigs, this was an excuse we’d never have the luxury of using again.

  By this time the lank-haired blob to my right, who some of the audience evidently thought was the wrestler Giant Haystacks caught up in a freak double-booking accident, decided it was time to perform his party piece, or, if you prefer, play his joker. During the instrumental break of ‘Pissed Up, Pissed Through and Pissed Off’, he played a reasonable solo in the first position, a ropey solo behind his head and a rip-roaringly rotten solo with his tongue. God knows why, but the audience loved it. As far as I was concerned, the technique sounded bloody awful even when Jimi Hendrix did it, but at least he was the wiry sex-god hip-priest of his age. When performed by a bleached beached whale from Bromley Cross, it seemed an entertainment-free zone to me, but there’s no accounting for taste. As I sat there, pummelling out some indeterminate and imprecise rhythm, watching Barry drooling on to his pick-ups, I consoled myself that even though things were bad, at least I’d never come near the end of his salivating tongue. How Janet got through the day I really couldn’t imagine. As the song shuddered to a halt we heard a strange noise that sounded vaguely familiar, although it took us a few seconds to recognise it as applause. During this unexpected interlude Percy pulled a rancid towel from his duffle bag and proceeded to wipe the spittle from his strings, and I remember thinking that if it’s true that all good guitars have their own personality then this one must be thoroughly cheesed off. I presume he eventually sold the SG on, and I can only hope he did so with a health warning; then at least the new owner could get it steam-cleaned. Still, we had public approval to propel us onwards now and, not wanting to take any chances, we hurried through Golden Earring’s ‘Radar Love’, the inevitable ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and an uncharacteristically sensitive Brightwell ballad built around the poignant chorus couplet ‘Love is so fickle, Let me touch you, let me tickle’. Oddly, this seemed to strike a chord with young lovers in the audience, who snogged each other blind while Baz demonstrated how he could make his guitar gently weep, while simultaneously adopting strange facial expressions which appeared to indicate extreme digestive difficulties.

  As the song put itself out of its misery there was a smattering of applause, but most of those present, having discovered the joys of sticking their tongues down each others’ throats, remained more interested in experiencing first-hand heavy petting than third-rate heavy metal. Having thus snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, we lumbered into our last song, the anthemic ‘I’ll Give Her One from You’, during which the irrepressible Menk Holdsworth unleashed his final inventive masterstroke by switching on an anglepoise lamp behind Mark Sayers’ speakers in an attempt to give the stage a ghostly back-lit radiance. All this actually achieved was to demonstrate that the cabinets were entirely empty and were there only as a tawdry bit of set dressing. As if being caught red-handed in possession of the bogus bass bins wasn’t enough, we had to endure further indignity before reaching the sanctity of the dressing-room. In a real stroke of bad luck the sound engineer Harold, who’d come on hire with the PA system, had proved to be more than capable and had succeeded in making the vocals audible. Had he been a friend of ours, he would have safely buried them out of harm’s way, but instead the bewildered parents who’d arrived to pick up their slobbering offspring gathered at the rear of the hall to witness an off-key beanpole in face paint shriek the memorable lines:

  I wanna rock it to her,

  I wanna sock it to her,

  If it’s the last thing that I do,

  I’ll give her one from you.

  Worse still, one of the gobsmacked dads turned out to be my English teacher, Mr Corcoran, whose face crumbled at witnessing this flagrant misuse of his beloved native tongue. As he commented in poetry class the next week, the lyrical style of Billy Moon had very little in common with that of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  It was with a palpable sense of relief, then, that we reached our final pile-driver chord, during the sustain of which I slashed the back
drop to shreds with a brass fencing sword I’d taken down from over Auntie Mary’s fireplace. What a showman. What a tosser. With an exhibition of dextrous handling that wouldn’t have been out of place on One Man and His Dog, the remnants of the crowd were then herded out of the fire exit by their exasperated guardians with only slightly less speed than that achieved by the band fleeing the stage. To bring the evening full circle, and anticipating your disbelief – I promise this is true – the desolate Lipsey smacked his painted-by-numbers face into the same cross-beam he’d head-butted before we’d even played a note.

  We didn’t do an encore, because Barry had broken a string and didn’t want to use another one.

  We played a few more times after that but, to be honest we were, even at that early stage, pulling in different directions, often during the same song. I think we all realised that the writing was on the wall. The wall in question ran down Dobson Road next to the school playing fields and the writing daubed on it read: ‘Billy Moon are shit’.

  Eventually, big Baz left to investigate the world of cabaret. We last saw him at Moor Lane bus station with an acoustic guitar wrapped in a floral duvet cover saying he was off to an audition for Opportunity Knocks (it didn’t), while Doris left to investigate the world of mind-bending narcotics. Mark and I, like two First World War veterans who’d bonded in the trenches through their shared traumatic experiences, decided we’d stay together and find another band.