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

by Mark Radcliffe

  It could only get better.

  3

  Zoot Suit and the Zeroids

  Amazingly, it did get better when we formed Zoot Suit and the Zeroids. The genesis of the band has uncanny parallels with the formation of that other revered heavy-blues combo Led Zeppelin, and in fact seasoned Zep watchers will often wistfully mention the Zeroids in the same breath. Like Led Zeppelin, the Zeroids had a Z in it, but there was even more to it than that. Both bands represented a coming together of two disparate duos. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were already established musicians, having played with such household names as the Yardbirds, Donovan and P.J. Proby when they recruited unknowns Robert Plant and John Bonham from the heavy-metal heartland known as the Black Country in homage to the local demon overlords Black Sabbath. With spooky similarity, Stig Burgess and Paul Hemingway were veterans not only of Cairo, who played a memorable set for the Girl Guides at Woodlands, but also of the seminal Macaris Lives Big Band in a line-up completed, as you probably already know, by Spider and Earl. To say Stocky and I were unknowns wouldn’t be strictly accurate, because the name Billy Moon had been widely circulated, often with a public health warning, but we were certainly aware we’d moved up a league. From the Beazer Homes to the GM Vauxhall Conference.

  Stig was a revelation to us. He knew songs the like of which we’d never heard: Otis Redding songs, Jonathan Richman songs, Gram Parsons songs, Ry Cooder songs. He’d even got a few of his own, which, like a lot of J.J. Cale’s compositions, appeared simplistic and almost half-hearted, but which took on a timeless quality when he played them, as if they could have been written at any time during the last fifty years. They had throwaway titles like ‘Good Time Man’ or ‘Running Down the Road’, and he’d strum the three rudimentary chords on his natural Fender Telecaster while mumbling the lyrics with his eyes closed. In his floppy cap, straggly hair and bushy beard he had modelled himself on Lowell George. If you don’t know who Lowell George is, then get hold of an album by the late lamented American rolling-boogie band Little Feat and look at the photograph of the players. The one who looks like a latter-day George Best after a three-day binge is the revered slide guitarist, songwriter and singer Lowell George. Lowell was known in his day as a bit of a hellraiser in that he liked women, drugs and food in formidable quantities and, I daresay, even enjoyed the odd shandy, and quite possibly a glass of sweet sherry on special occasions. How these rock stars manage to satisfy these outrageous appetites and live to a ripe old age is a mystery to me. Sadly, it was also a mystery to Lowell George, who died in 1979 at the age of thirty-four.

  Relatively tame in comparison, Stig’s level of debauchery was restricted to a regular fix of Watney’s dark mild, but he desperately wanted to be American. In his mind, I’m sure he saw himself as a dust-bowl balladeer of the late forties, cruising the lost highways in a battered pick-up truck wearing gasoline-splattered dungarees. In reality he was a lab technician in his late twenties cruising Chorley New Road in a battered Vauxhall Viva. He did have the dungarees, though. I met Stig through a mate of mine called Joe Goulden, who I’d arranged to hook up with in town to visit the wine lodge on Bradshawgate, which gleefully added to its legitimate income by selling tumblers of warm Australian wine to underage drinkers. Joe was heavily involved with the Venture Scouts and, en route to the penny blob shebeen, had to drop in at a meeting about the next trek camp at the Swan. This didn’t seem a very ambitious trek camp destination to me. The Swan was only on the corner of Churchgate, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, after a couple of pints and several bags of pork scratchings, Stig and I got chatting about music and he was raving on about this new American genius called Bruce Springsteen, who was going to be the biggest star in the world. I took this with a pinch of salt, safe in the knowledge that whoever this Springclean divot was, he’d never be as big as the Strawbs.

  During the course of the conversation Stig mentioned that he was a singer and guitarist and had a mate who’d played sax with him in the recently disbanded Macaris Lives, thus instigating a search for a new rhythm section. It was one of those historic meetings which really ought to be commemorated with a plaque. Like Rolls meeting Royce, like Livingstone meeting Stanley, like, at the risk of getting carried away, Little meeting Large, it was obvious that fate had drawn us together that night. Stig introduced me to his sax-playing mate Paul Hemingway, who was another prime mover in the Venture Scouts. The Venture Scouts were a faction I knew very little about, because I never made it beyond the Wolf Cubs. In fact I only lasted there about a month, because my mum wouldn’t buy me the green jersey until she was sure I was ‘going to fit in’. Being the only kid in the scout hut in a Fair Isle cardigan, there wasn’t much chance of that.

  Paul Hemingway was the only bloke in Bolton who had a saxophone and had mastered all the rock’n’roll techniques associated with it. These are, in ascending order of importance, making it go honk, making it go squeak and swinging it from side to side while winking at girls in the audience. Every song we played was embellished during the chorus with a succession of bowel-loosening honks interspersed with the squawking sound of an asphyxiated iguana in its death throes. If confronted by the appearance of these rogue reed splits, sax players are apt to get defensive and say ‘I meant to do that, you musical philistine’, and throw several more in the next time round just to prove it was intentional. We gave up discussing it with him in the end, but it always struck me as odd that if he meant to make that noise, then how come it always happened in a different place, and why did he look as startled as the rest of us? Like his guitar-toting compadre, Paul appeared to have modelled himself on a famous exponent of his chosen instrument, but whereas Stig’s role model was a respected blues icon, Paul’s was the saxophonist off The Muppets. When it came to developing a physical resemblance to this puppet idol, Paul had a head start, because he looked like him to begin with, and once his protuberant hooter and bulging eyes had been topped with a battered fedora, it wouldn’t have been a surprise, except possibly to his wife Jennifer, to sneak round the back and find Jim Henson’s hand up his arse.

  Eventually Zoot Suit and the Zeroids would rehearse up a set of soul and blues and country that would come to be met with polite applause rather than the bewildered stares that Stocky and I were used to. We’d play gigs attended by up to fifty at Pip’s Night-spot, Rivington Barn and even the Cypress Tavern in Manchester, where the lack of stage lighting resulted in an eleventh-hour dash back to Bolton in the Viva to borrow two desk lamps. Years later, Talking Heads performed at the Free Trade Hall with a stage lit only by white light, and I often wonder if David Byrne had seen the Zeroids at the Cypress Tavern that night. It’s quite possible that he might have been ploughing a lonely furrow through the unfamiliar city streets, drawn inexorably towards the sign that read: ‘Tonight: Vodka Fifty Pence A Shot plus live band’. However, this was all in the future, as both Stig and Paul were off to Marrakesh on the Venture Scouts’ trek camp, where they would walk several hundred miles with army surplus stoves on their backs and attempt to live on ten pence a week. All we knew at this stage was that the four of us were going to be in a band together. We had no idea what it was going to sound like until several months later, when we would go to a gig that would knock us completely off our feet. In the meantime, it was all on hold while they spent the summer getting heat-stroke digging latrines in North Africa, and Stocky and I lazed around my bedroom contemplating the colour of Pippa Johnson’s pants.

  By this time Mark and I had become sixth formers, which meant that we’d undergone several major changes of life. For a kick-off, we were allowed to wear our own clothes to school. You were still obliged to dress smartly, but you were freed from the shackles of uniform. I was particularly proud of my brown three-piece, wide-lapelled, improbably flared suit, in which I felt the essence of cool right up to spilling a jug of parsley sauce down it in the dining-hall.

  We were also transforming physically. With a good stacked heel, I was now very nearly as tall as some of th
e girls I was trying to get off with.

  Mentally I was maturing as well. I no longer felt the need to bait my sister on a daily basis. Sometimes we would go for as long as two or three days without a sporadic outbreak of mindless violence. I still ignored my little brother for weeks at a time, not so much because he was ‘just a nipper’ but because he was so much better at football than I was. He had better hair, too. He was five years younger than me and yet he had thick, shiny gorgonesque curls down to his shoulders. I was supposed to be the trainee hippy in that household!

  What I had perfected was a teenage expertise in laziness. That summer I convinced myself that I wasn’t just being bone idle, but that like many musicians and thespians I was ‘resting’ between engagements. A plumber or decorator would be more likely to describe this situation as ‘unemployment’, but in performing circles it’s known as ‘resting’ and you can’t help wishing that the members of Iron Maiden had rested a good deal longer.

  While I was euphemistically ‘resting’, I immersed myself in buying vast quantities of LPs, which I took up to my bedroom to listen to intently while studying the sleeve notes obsessively. It wasn’t just the lyrics I memorised, it was crucial information like the studio where it had been recorded (often Rockfield), the name of the tape op (regularly Alan Parsons) and the identity of the cover artist (just about always Roger Dean). This addiction to the accumulation of anorak information plagues me even now. I’m the bloke who sits in the cinema and watches the film right through to the end of the credits, just to make sure it was recorded in Dolby stereo. (Incidentally, I don’t think the boffins who invented Dolby stereo are all that industrious. Dolby B and Dolby C have been around years now, and there’s still no sign of them coming up with Dolby D.)

  When buying a record, it was vital to remember that not only was no one else allowed to have heard of it, but there had to be a good chance that your mum and dad would hate it. The obscurity factor was crucial in terms of enhancing your personal credibility. Often I would purchase albums by bands I’d never even heard of myself, just for the thrill of walking into the sixth-form common room with Amazing Blondel’s Fantasia Lindum under my arm. Of course, this was a risky purchasing policy because for every Flying Burrito Brothers you had to go through a ruck of Horslips or Blodwyn Pigs or Tonto’s Expanding Headbands. This put something of a drain on my meagre finances, but it was worth it for the heart-stopping moments when you bought a record because you liked the sleeve, and when you put it on discovered that this Alex Harvey bloke had, in Next, made one of the truly great albums. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m sure long-standing fans of the Velvet Underground, U2, REM and Oasis feel the same way. That it was somehow better when it was secret.

  The parental annoyance factor was equally important. It is one of those unbreakable rules of adolescence that you must develop a taste for whatever kind of music your parents like the least. If your mum and dad like Sepultura, go out and buy Suzanne Vega; if your mum and dad like the Beautiful South, go out and buy Public Enemy; and if your mum and dad like Phil Collins, leave home immediately. From trad jazz, through rock’n’roll, heavy metal, progressive rock, punk, rap and house, teen music has always been something your parents hated. As a pimply youth I remember thinking how dreadful it was when I went round to my mate Nicky Holt’s house to listen to records and his dad, Trevor, would come into the room and profess to be taking an interest. Standing in the corner with his neatly trimmed moustache, bifocals and cardigan with leatherette panels, he’d tap his right Hush Puppy and say things like ‘Yes, very jaunty, King Crimson really are a proficient beat group, aren’t they, boys?’ or ‘I must say, this Pink Floyd fellow has a resonant singing tone and that Jethro Tull chap is a very accomplished flautist.’

  When your dad likes your record collection it’s time to move on. Even if it means Marilyn Manson. I spent years following acts I wasn’t that bothered about just because it annoyed my mum. When Arthur Brown appeared on Top of the Pops singing ‘Fire’ in streaked face paint, a silk kimono and a flaming head-dress, I really couldn’t have cared less until my mum said, ‘Well, look at that idiot in a ladies’ blouse with his balaclava on fire and he hasn’t even washed his face.’ After that, I’d have followed him anywhere. Even, on one occasion, Hebden Bridge. The point is that every era of teen culture has its defining musical movement, which you only fully understand if you’re the right age and go to the right clubs. When I hear the latest techno releases and say ‘Well, where’s the tune in that, then?’ I get looked at like I’m a silly old tosser. In truth, I get looked at that way relatively often, and not just in relation to music, but why should I relate to techno? I’m a forty-year-old father who these days finds most pub juke-boxes a tad intrusive, and if I understand techno then techno’s got it wrong. And anyway, if I pretended to like techno then I’d have turned into Trevor Holt, and I’m not ready for that cardigan just yet, although a pair of comfortable Hush Puppies does look increasingly tempting.

  The live gigs we went to took place almost exclusively at Bolton Institute of Technology, a sprawl of charmless glass and concrete obelisks on a patch of scrubland between dual carriageways. A large proportion of the inmates were the kind of students who were too thick to go to polytechnic and too lazy to sign on. Instead they led a peculiar twilight existence tramping around the back streets of Bolton with unkempt beards, trying to summon up the concentration to roll another fag. They were the kind of people who considered expending energy was distinctly uncool and had to think long and hard about whether they could be bothered to remove their trousers before evacuating their bowels. I’m quite sure some of them perfected acute constipation to save themselves the effort of wiping their arses.

  Intermingled with the bobble-hatted undead were desperately keen clean-cut innocents from the Middle East whose wealthy guardians had been seduced into coughing up extortionate fees to send their precious offspring to what the prospectus implied was one of our finest Ivy League institutions. Once there, our foreign friends would hone their linguistic skills while discussing ergonomics in the windswept modernist piazzas with the cream of England’s public-school intelligentsia. Or so their parents thought. During recess, accounting for no more than thirty-six weeks of the year, they were expected to return home intellectually sharper with an intimate knowledge of British business practice, ready to revolutionise the running of the family empire. In reality they got back two stone heavier with an intricate knowledge of joint rolling, ready to sleep for six weeks.

  Every Saturday night there was a band on at the BIT union bar. In theory this was open to students only, but as security was undertaken by campus inhabitants who were horizontal by eight-thirty, it wasn’t difficult to slip in. Being schoolboys, Stocky and I might have looked incongruous with our neat haircuts and chain-store slacks, but the yetis on the door probably assumed we’d come from Saudi Arabia to study metallurgy. Once through the security cordon, you entered a large room filled with luminescent orange foam furniture on which hirsute zombies in brushed denim performed tonsillectomies on each other, while paralysis-inducing strobe lights blinked along to Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. Brilliant.

  On a good day the rugby scrum at the beer pumps could be negotiated in as little as thirty-five minutes. The principal reason for the delay was not that the cigarette-burn-peppered melamine bar itself was the length of the counter in a down-at-heel toffee shop, but that it was staffed entirely by volunteers from the student populace. Reaching the front of the queue, you could swear you’d arrived in a world devised by Tolkien where hairy little trolls in woollen bonnets sloped around in a somnambulant shuffle. On a hot night it’d be touch and go whether you’d get your pint before it evaporated. Payment took the form of a token feudal exchange of coinage, but goods, services or the promise of a big tonguey snog later seemed to do nicely as well. God knows who underwrote the potentially crippling losses, but I’ve a strong suspicion that it was the parents of those Saudi Arabian guys who received a letter from the p
rincipal assuring them that it was absolutely the norm for union subscriptions to run into the thousands.

  Having successfully obtained two bottles of Newcastle Amber each, we would then step carefully over tie-dyed, frizzy-haired couples who’d decided that copulation was a sport best undertaken on a crowded dance floor, to sit cross-legged in front of the stage and wait for the band. I’ve always found sitting cross-legged distinctly uncomfortable, but no self-respecting trainee student was allowed to sit any other way. One thing was for sure, if I’d unfolded a small camping stool I’d have stood even less chance of swapping spit with that drug-addled, ethnic-shirted, afro-haired biochemist from Luton. Dennis, I think he was called.

  There was a different band on every week, but the casual observer would have been hard pushed to notice the difference, such were the similarities between them. Admittedly they all had different names, which would normally have been a dead giveaway, but there were people in that building whose state of mind was so fragile that remembering who they’d seen last week was a mental peak they were incapable of scaling. I can recall witnessing such legends as Gong, Aange, Amon Duul, Magma, Fruup, Hatfield And The North and, of course, the mighty Hawkwind. Wholly disparate groups, they shared many common elements. For a start, the members of each band all seemed to live together on some semi-derelict ramshackle pig farm in Belgium, despite which they all dressed in the manner of the Pied Piper of Hamelin newly installed as a U-boat captain. Additionally, each line-up contained at least nine people, one of whom would always be bald, another of whom would play an instrument you wouldn’t expect to find in a rock band, for instance a cor anglais, alpine horn or sackbut, and yet another would weave around the stage in a catatonic trance, evidently interpreting the vibes in mime and movement.